Keeping Up With My Millionaire Girlfriend

She shops in Prada, he buys his clothes in charity shops. Rob Crossan explains how love works across the financial divide – just don’t tell her about the meal deals

Have you ever seen a female multimillionaire stare blankly at a pork pie? Anna, at the age of 41, had never seen one before her first picnic with me last week. The look on her face as she examined it suggested an inner feeling that a long and sustained run of good fortune in her life had just come to a sad and very sudden end. She carefully handed me the hefty sized pie (which I’d bought from the Fortnum & Mason deli counter earlier that day) unaware of just how much I’d paid for it in order to find a middle ground between her cosmopolitan wealth and my still oft-provincial foodie preferences.

Getting to her feet, she stepped out of the shadow of the tree we had been lounging under in the more fashionable eastern end of Hampstead Heath. ‘I do appreciate the effort, Rob,’ she said kindly. ‘But Soho House has ice buckets and champagne on its roof terrace.’ Clearly my romantic picnic was a bad idea. ‘I should probably never introduce you to pork scratchings,’ I blustered, as we walked to the car park. I chucked the pork pie away and climbed into her Aston Martin, a two-step act that raised me around six social classes in the space of four seconds. I’d never felt more alive, or confused. Such is life when you’re dating a millionaire.