The shortest love story

Adele Mynott, 39, became a widow just 10 weeks after she married the love of her life

- FIONA LOCKE, BESS BROWNING

As I swiped through various eligible bachelors on a dating app, I groaned at how few men seemed a compatible match for me. Friends told me to persevere with my quest for love but the apps were tiresome and I often found my finger hovering over the ‘delete’ button. I wasn’t settling for anything less than perfect. Then, in October 2017, a profile appeared on my app that made me pause. The stranger’s deep blue-green eyes and friendly smile raised my hopes.

Three weeks later, after hundreds of messages exchanged between us, I was finally meeting Sean face to face. But to my humiliation, I’d dressed up as a corpse bride for a Halloween party the night before and the ‘washes off’ label of the fake blood I’d coated myself in was definitely a lie.

As much as I scrubbed, crimson splodges stained my faceand body. ‘I’ve tried everything to get it off,’ I said over the phone to Sean, mortified. But his relaxed laughter calmed me down. ‘Just come as you are,’ he chuckled.

He greeted me with a warm hug and a grin as I arrived at the pub and we didn’t stop talking all night. He told me about his job in telecoms, his passion for football, and we bonded over our mutual frustration with dating apps. But out for dinner the following week, I started to realise the app had found me an incredibly special man.

I wasn’t the only one who adored Sean – my friends and my mum, Anne, then 72, took to him straight away. He was endearingly shy at times, especially when meeting my friends and family, but he had a cheeky side, too. He once deliberately lost me in a maze at a National Trust garden, finding it hilarious that I couldn’t find my way out.

So happy