Ok. You’ve all been reading this blog long enough. You’ve heard about The Italian and you *know* he broke my heart. I owe it to you tell you how. And I think it will work quite well as a fractured fairy tale, so here goes.

Once upon a time, in 2001, in a time before Twitter, Facebook and FourSquare, a beautiful princess met a handsome prince at work. Ok, she wasn’t really beautiful, but she was quite attractive. And she wasn’t really a princess either; she was an office temp. And while we are on the subject, he wasn’t a prince, he was an engineer. And he wasn’t exactly handsome, but he had a lovely face.

The princess knew, on first glance that she and the prince were meant to be together. She felt like she had known him forever. He had a strength and warmth that she found irresistible. So she pursued the prince. After all, if she felt it, he must too, right?

And eventually, after two or three months, he visited her at her castle for afternoon tea. And then they had a lunch date, and then they had Their First Real Date. On the princess’s 39th birthday.

(All the while, as with all romances in this particular day and age, the emails were constant. Back and forward, all day, every day. The princess craved them. She hungered for the contact. They completed her. They meant something.)

The night of Their First Real Date, the prince picked her up in his chariot (actually it was a Holden station wagon) and took her to a delightful Italian restaurant in North Adelaide. They talked the entire night and were the last ones to leave. Hours felt like minutes, the time went so fast. It was exactly as the princess pictured: they were so comfortable in each other’s company that they felt like they had known each other forever. And he paid for it all: meal, drinks, everything.

Afterwards, in a dark corner of the Old Lion Hotel, they had their first kiss. The princess swooned. That kiss was all she thought it would be; warm, sensuous, passionate, all-consuming. That kiss wrapped around her and she wanted to drown in it, it was so beautiful. And they went back to her castle and kissed some more.

And just when it got to the point where the princess was ready to give herself to the prince, he dropped a bombshell.

He was in a relationship, and had been for five years. It wasn’t a good relationship, but he could not take things further until he had some closure around that. The prince could not and would not sleep with the princess.

The prince dressed and left the castle and the princess, without a backward glance. Just like that. In the blink of an eye, the spark of something beautiful and special was extinguished. The princess was devastated. How could the prince, in all his conversations with her, omit this one very important detail?

Part 2 >>