To that one moment!

It is the time. That time of the day, that time of your life, when the canvas of your heart goes blank. A thousand words spoken, and they all come down to one last page, a final stroke of the pen that writes those four words. Whatever your mind was so carefully reading, however fast your heart was racing, whatever your eyes were saying, for a moment you are simply vacant. Something sweeps you off your feet. To that time of your life when someone said "Will you marry me?" with a tremor in the voice, drenched in love, eyes gleaming with hope. The touch of his hands, and you felt that pull in the stomach, the tingling in your arms, the quiver in your lungs. You lived an era in that one moment.

Roll life back a little, to the night before. To his open eyes, arms folded behind his head, sitting in the balcony, gazing endlessly up. The night grows old with every blink, a rush of thoughts trekking through a million stars in the moonstruck sky. He knows it; he feels it. Something has given way inside. He is no longer the same. An inch taller, an inch wider, a pound lighter; he flies. At dawn there is no fear in him, no frown. He gets up, dresses, runs through the woods, and just before her house he kneels to say: you are the one.

With that final stroke of the pen he wrote "Will you marry me?" and she nodded yes. And, as they say, they lived happily ever after.

This is for the four couples who sat in my living room last evening and, one by one, told the rest of us how they fell for each other, and who proposed to whom. This is to that moment when each of them felt it, to the moment they promised to love each other till the dusk of their lives, till they turn seventy and beyond.

It left a bachelor with a line from Love Actually that he has never quite managed to shake: if you look for it, love actually is all around.