When Jo, my university friend who’d given the funny speech, got engaged, it had really made me question what Alexander and I had. I’d seen it written somewhere before that funerals aren’t about the dead, they’re about the living, and I think weddings often aren’t about the couple at the front of the aisle so much as the congregation. Has anyone ever been to a wedding and thought about anyone but themselves? I haven’t. I mean, obviously when Jo got married I was over the moon for her. She’d met Kwame on an app, swiping right on him one lonely Sunday evening, meeting him for the first time two days later, and within a month was calling him her boyfriend. It had surprised me, if only because the last person she was with was her girlfriend, and I just assumed she’d never date a man again for all she slagged them off. Humans exist to surprise us, I suppose, and who am I to write off a mate’s sexuality into a box just so that I can feel better about where they sit on the spectrum? It was wrong of me to assume anything. (Assuming makes an ass out of u-and-me, was another thing my grandmother used to say.)

Anyway.

Three months in Jo and Kwame were saying ‘I Love You’, and after six months they got a house together. I wanted to be a good friend, as did Bri and Kezza – the two others who, alongside Jo, make up our Core Four friendship group – and so tentatively we approached the idea that it was all moving quite quickly. What was the rush? Jo didn’t freak out or get mad when we raised it; she just smiled. I remember it really clearly. We were at Bridges in Stoke Newington one Saturday afternoon, eating quinoa and sausages, right as spring was starting. She’d shrugged and we’d all known it was the real deal when she dreamily said, ‘This one just feels different. We want the same things.’

We want the same things.