Our story began somewhere incredibly romantic: outside the public toilets in Probus. On Halloween.

Charlotte was 16 and still fully committed to trick or treating in a Minnie Mouse costume that was definitely pushing the age limit. Alex, an awkward 18-year-old freshly back from Birmingham, walked up to her, paused for far too long, and delivered one of the greatest chat-up lines of all time:

“Can I… touch your glove?”

It was a nice black velvet glove, to be fair. Charlotte said yes, mostly out of confusion. Alex poked it, then somehow made it weirder by asking if he could wear one of her gloves so he could “touch her glove with his glove.” Charlotte concluded he was probably a complete weirdo. Alex wandered off thinking it had gone quite well.

Over the next few months we kept bumping into each other at parties and became the kind of friends who stayed up for hours on MSN, oversharing and getting into the occasional questionable teenage adventure.

Then Alex moved back to Birmingham, and we assumed that was that… until about a year later when Charlotte’s family randomly bought a business near where Alex lived. Within an hour of them arriving, Alex appeared like he’d been tracking the moving van.

Our first official date? Costa Coffee. With Charlotte’s 7-year-old sister Thea third-wheeling.

That was 13 years ago. Somehow the slightly awkward boy who wanted to touch a glove and the slightly too old Minnie Mouse ended up building a whole life together.