The Most Romantic Thing That Ever Happened To Us

Three women reveal the moments they'll never forget.

- Savanna Douglas

Novelist CLAIRE FULLER, 51, has two grown-up kids from a past relationship. She lives with second husband, Tim.

"Have your ever been asked what - apart from your loved ones - you would save from a burning house? My answer would be the love notes that Tim wrote and hid for me soon after we first met. Tim was an Internet date. If I’m honest, he was about my 47th, while I was his first. We’d been seeing each other for a month when we started some art projects together – I have a degree in sculpture and we thought it would be fun. In any case, I was already madly in love with this man and would probably have done anything he suggested.

It was Tim’s idea to write the notes and hide them in each other’s houses. They were all short, a few sentences at the most. Tim had also been married before and both of us knew that, however much in love you are at the start, relationships don’t always last.

I wrote to Tim about my hopes for our future, jotted down the lyrics of songs we both liked, and told him how much I loved him. One morning, when I was staying at his flat, he went out to buy the Sunday newspaper and I went about hiding his notes. I taped one to the back of a mirror, another I put in a saucepan he rarely used, a third went in-between the leaves of a stack of Post-it notes. There were five in all, and Tim wrote five for me. At some point, when he was in my house on his own, he hid them, too.

The first one I found was in a seldom-used cup. It had been there for months. I sat on the floor, holding my breath while I opened it. ‘Will you keep me for another year?’ I read as tears came. Tim finally found one of mine tucked into the neck of a narrow vase he was about to throw out.