Second time lucky

Meanwhile, 50 kilometres away, Steve was wondering what he was letting himself in for. “It was all very mysterious. I was desperately trying to put a face to the name. I’d heard the name ‘Suzi Ryan’ but from where? And of course the school connection wasn’t obvious because it was my neighbours inviting me out to make up numbers for a dinner party. The curiosity was killing me.”

The night of the dinner party arrived and the matchmakers realised their cupid arrows were well marked. “I tried not to stare into his eyes,” recalls Suzi, “they’re just so beautiful. He was so easy to talk to and listen to; and he listened to me, too, even as
I babbled into overdrive with nerves.”

“No doubt about it, I was attracted to Suzi the moment I saw her,“ says Steve. “But I spent the night expecting to be called away to work.”

There was no call-out, but as the night went on, the two found themselves separated in true Aussie social style: the women at one end of the table, the men at the other end, all trying to talk over the background music that was progressively getting louder.

When the group decided to call it a night, the parting was, both say, awkward. “We shook hands and said goodnight. There was nothing more,” says Steve. “I’d hoped we’d go for a coffee and talk some more,” admits Suzi.

Once again, that could have been the end of it if not for matchmaker Julie, who took it upon herself to slip Steve Suzi’s number, claiming Suzi had asked him to have it, and told Suzi that Steve had asked for it. “Honestly, Julie was like a 12-year-old passing notes,” laughs Suzi.

It took Steve four days to pluck up the courage to make the call; four agonising days for Suzi, who remembers “the amazing tummy turns and feeling like a teenager again, full of wonderings and self-doubt”.

From that phone call, the courtship swung into a whirlwind of dinners, lunches, movies, nightly phone calls – and even gardening. “It’s not every day I’d offer to lop a lady’s hedges,” Steve laughs.

Then, of course, there was the matter of ‘the boys’. Matt and Jake both attended the school Suzi taught at. When they’d arrived with their dad to lop a branch off a tree on a Sunday, and found the house belonged to Ms Ryan, they put two and two together and got: “Dad’s dating a teacher!”

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