I met my boyfriend in a nightclub – and now we’re engaged

Every relationship has to start somewhere. Some people meet each other in the conventional way, by getting introduced by mutual friends. Or nowadays, on one of the many dating apps that require just one swipe to find your perfect match. That’s considered the norm.

Astoria, the night club where we met

When you tell people how you met your partner, unless it was in a fairly ”normal” way, you do get judged and the same comments chucked at you every time. I’m here to tell you it doesn’t matter how you met, nor is it weird if you didn’t know each other for years before getting together. It really is not important.

I met my now Fiance, Ryan, in a nightclub when I just finishing the end of my first year of university. I was 19 and he was 18. He was a local, but unlike many of my peers at uni, I don’t feel like I’m above those who live here. I was dressed as a leopard. It was ”alternative” night at Astoria, with the fancy dress theme of Jungle Animals (anyone from Portsmouth will be all too familiar).

To get a good idea of the soundtrack we met to, think of your iPod in 2008 when you were in the throes of your emo phase (you had one, don’t lie). Nothing quite like getting absolutely wankered to the sound of Blink-182, it’s fab.

My friend and I had bumped into him outside before the night began, where he and his mate drunkenly complimented us on our costumes. We walked into the club with him and his mate, then separated.

There are so many awful puns I could make, but I won’t.

During the course of the night, his mate kept leaving him on his own, whilst he chatted to girls. So, we felt sorry for him and went and joined him. We started chatting, took each other’s number and promised to keep in touch (although at the time, I was five snakebites to the wind). In his drunken state, he had tried to impress me by saying he played for Portsmouth FC.

We then met up in the next coming weeks quite a lot, and were almost inseparable from then. So when I hear people say relationships that begin in nightclubs, or in other unconventional ways won’t last, I do have to laugh. People always say “you were drunk when you met” as if that somehow invalidates our attraction to one another. Yes beer goggles are a thing, but clearly not in this case as it’s been more than a year.

Over a year later.

My mates were all not bothered about it, given my best mate was there when we met, but other people I didn’t know quite so well always had something to say about it. You could tell they were surprised, I suppose because most people who meet in clubs only want one thing then dash the next day. It really wasn’t like that for us though. I still get ribbed for being a year older than him. If I hear the word ‘toy-boy’ again I will scream.

We’ve now been together over a year, and are engaged. We see each other most of the time and are hoping to move in together next year. Although to some our engagement might be a bit fast, I’m quite an impulsive person and I tend to ignore social conventions, although that makes me sound like a pretentious twat. I do feel like people don’t take our engagement seriously too, but that’s their problem.

It’s weird knowing we met by pure chance- if we hadn’t gone out that night, and bumped into each other, I’d be single sobbing into copious amounts of ice-cream and watching Netflix ( I still do that, minus the sobbing).

To anyone who says it’s shallow to meet in a nightclub as you’re at your best/it’s just your looks they’re going off/it’s dark… You know what? It doesn’t mean shit. On Tinder you’re matching someone based on vanity, when they’re looking their best. They aren’t going to put pictures up where they look like a pork scratching, are they?

At the end of the day, we’d all love a romantic love story on par with Ted from How I met your Mother. But realistically, that’s very unlikely. How you meet your partner is ultimately not at all important, so might as well embrace it because it won’t affect your relationship in any way. If you meet your partner in the frozen peas section of ASDA, who actually cares? Just own it! I almost didn’t go out that night, but I’m glad I did or I wouldn’t have met such an amazing person.