You CAN find love in your 50s. I never knew how to act around men so they thought I was prickly and aggressive, says CHRISTINA PATTERSON. But I held out for Mr Right... and here's how I knew I'd found him
So Miranda Hart is in love, aged 51. The actress, who was almost as famous for being terminally single as for her comic talent, announced last week - as she published her memoir I Haven't been Entirely Honest With You - that she has secretly married.
Unlikely as it sounds, during lockdown, when she was laid low by exhaustion brought on by Lyme disease, a building surveyor came to assess damp at her home in Hampshire and stole her heart.
Her joy gave me a rush of fellow feeling. Like Miranda, I have written a book about coping with life's ups and downs, including illness and loneliness. I know what it's like to be seen as the eternal singleton. And, like her, I found love in midlife and got married for the first time in my 50s.
Miranda played Chummy in Call The Midwife and Miss Bates in an adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma, but she's probably best-known for the self-titled BBC sitcom she wrote and starred in, which ran from 2009 to 2015 and won multiple awards.
Viewers instantly warmed to the tall (she's 6ft 1in), plump, slightly ungainly woman who kept finding herself in awkward situations and seemed to lack the social skills to deal with them. It didn't take a genius to guess that there was an autobiographical element to the performance and the scripts.
Christina Patterson found love in midlife and got married for the first time in her 50s
Miranda's shyness with men had the ring of truth. So did the desperation of her mother (played by Patricia Hodge) for her to find a husband. And both rang bells for me.
'I was very naïve sexually,' Hart joked on one occasion. 'My first boyfriend asked me to do missionary and I buggered off to Africa for six months.'
I suspect the first part of this, at least, was true. It was certainly true for me.
And the second? Well, I can tick that box too. My first boyfriend didn't ask me to have any kind of sex. We were both evangelical Christians and sex before marriage was strictly off the cards. But I did go off to become a missionary in my mid-twenties - not to Africa, but to Merseyside, with an organisation called Youth With A Mission. I can't say it helped my love life.
Which is ironic, because when I joined a youth club at the age of 14 – not realising it was attached to a Baptist church - it was with the chief aim of meeting boys. Within a few weeks, however, I'd made a dramatic transition from militant atheist to Bible-quoting Christian.
Our youth leader, Barry, made it clear that we should only go out with someone if God was telling us they were the person He wanted us to marry. And that we'd have to stay chaste until marriage even if He did.
I got my first boyfriend, via the church, when I was 19. We were both incredibly shy and, as instructed, chaste. When he dumped me, after five weeks, I felt pole-axed with humiliation. I was so terrified of being hurt again that I didn't go out with anyone else for seven years.
It was only after I lost my faith, at 26, that I also lost my virginity. But I didn't know how to have a relationship. I had no experience of the trial and error that helps people discover how to be comfortable and happy in a romantic situation, and how to help your partner be comfortable and happy too.
If I liked a man, I would be so paralysed by fear that I would come across as prickly and aggressive. I was shocked, in an early job, to discover that some of my male colleagues called me 'the ice maiden'.
Worse, the men I liked never seemed to ask me out. It was the cocky men, the charming narcissists, who did - and it never ended well. If I were to draw a graph of my love life in my 30s and 40s, it would include a handful of brief peaks and an awful lot of troughs.
Friends would rack their brains to see if there were any nice single men they could introduce me to. On the rare occasions they did, the response was generally mutual horror.
In my mid-30s, I joined a dating agency called Drawing Down the Moon. I didn't draw down the moon, or even a half-decent man, and discovered that while the women were paying high fees for their membership, many of the men were not. (More women than men joined back then, and the agency, it turned out, liked to keep the non-paying men on their books while the women paid hundreds of pounds a year to meet them.)
When internet dating came along, I decided to try that instead. Like most people, I have some horror stories to tell. There was the man with eczema and a ponytail who stuck his tongue down my throat almost as soon as we met.
There was the man with buck teeth who yelled out to the entire restaurant that I was 'a c***' and left me to pay the bill. Then there was the man who told me, the first time I was in his bed, that he 'was determined to hold out for something good'.
Actress Miranda Hart, 51, announced last week that she has secretly married
Christina aged 26, not long before she says she lost her faith and her virginity
So, in fact, was I. There were times when I was made to feel like a second-class citizen as a single woman. Holidays were a challenge. As friends paired off, it was hard to find someone to travel with - and who wants to spend an entire holiday on their own? Christmas could be a headache.
You can love your elderly parents but still not want to spend it with them, sleeping in your childhood bed. I even spent the odd Christmas on my own. Quite apart from anything else, there's the financial penalty of being single: single-room supplements and no one to split the mortgage or the bills with.
Politicians talk about 'hard-working families' in a way that seems to suggest single people aren't worth their breath – or vote. Often, I wanted to tell them they were wrong. In many ways, I had a rich, fascinating life. I had a successful career, wonderful friends. I didn't want to be in a relationship for the sake of it, but I did want to find someone I could love, who loved me.
And then, one day, a few months after I turned 51, Anthony popped up on my screen. I thought his face was not just handsome, but kind. 'Lovely man seeks lovely woman' was the headline above the photo in the dating profile. 'Lovely woman seeks lovely bloke' was the (slightly immodest) headline above mine.
We agreed to meet in a pub half-way between our homes. We had a bottle of Chilean Sauvignon and a bowl of lobster linguini. I was relaxed about the prospect of dribbling orange ribbons of pasta down my chin because I was relaxed from the moment I saw him. Anthony looked like his photo. He had - he has - a sculpted face and clear, blue eyes. But what he radiated was a sense of calm. Here, I thought, was a gentle man. Here, I thought, was a gentleman.
Christina and her husband Anthony. He has a sculpted face and clear, blue eyes, she writes. But what he radiated was a sense of calm. The couple pictured on their wedding day in 2020
When I woke up the next morning, I saw that he had sent me a long email at 6.30am. He must have spent half the night reading my journalism online. In ten bullet points, he told me what he thought. It was his sixth point that touched me most.
'I think you have had hardship in your life and are brave in the way that you have dealt with it.' He understood the challenges I'd faced up to that point – I'd lost my sister, my father and my job; I'd had breast cancer twice. I'd dealt with all of this on my own.
His seventh point made me feel as if I had been holding my breath and could finally breathe out. 'I think,' he wrote, 'I can offer you a lot of unconditional support.'
We met again the next night. I was excited to see him, but also strangely calm. When we saw each other for the third time, two days later, he slipped his hand around my waist and it felt to me as if it should always have been there.
Two days after that, we went for a walk through woods full of wild garlic and bluebells. That night, in my sitting room, we danced to Madeleine Peyroux's Dance Me to the End of Time.
It was exciting in a way I had never experienced before. I've learnt that so much of the early thrill of romance comes from uncertainty. Does he like me? Can I trust him? Will this last? From the moment I met him, Anthony was solid as a rock. What I felt, when he wrapped me in his arms, was that I had come home.
This surely is what Miranda meant when she called her new husband 'my person'.
'I've got my best friend to do life with and it's wonderful,' she told The One Show this week.
I knew from the start that Anthony was 'my person' too. He was fabulously reliable. If he said he would do something, he would do it. If something was broken, he would mend it. He would go online and order a spare part and – hey presto! – I would have windows in my car that go up and down.
Just like Miranda's husband – a surveyor whom she met, with a hint of comedy, when her house needed remedial work for mould - Anthony prefers to make things happen than to be in the limelight. He prefers to listen than to talk about himself. Sometimes, after a party or a dinner, I'll beg him to big himself up a bit more. For a moment, he'll look crestfallen and then he'll set his jaw in that way I have learnt to recognise: 'Nope. That's not me.'
By the time we've reached midlife, we're no longer impressed by the obviously charming Garys (the hunky chef played by Tom Ellis in Miranda's sitcom) of this world. What we want - what Miranda wants and what I want - is a man who is good company, good-humoured and kind. The 'Mr Mould Man', as Miranda affectionately refers to her new husband. We have learnt through bitter experience that the narcissistic charmers are rarely a barrel of laughs at home.
When my friends met Anthony, they clutched my arms. Their message was clear. Don't let this one go! One sent me an email the morning after she met him: 'YOU'VE STRUCK GOLD!' When my mother met him, I thought she was actually going to clap.
When she died, the following year, I at least had the comfort of knowing she'd finally got to meet a man I loved. Anthony made a casserole for the wake, even though he was hobbling around on crutches after an operation.
When my brother died, two and a half years later, Anthony drove us down the motorway as I curled up on the passenger seat and howled. He helped me with the admin. He helped me clear, paint and sell my brother's house. When I told him that I would never be happy again, he told me that I would and that he would be there. Miraculously, and perhaps against the odds, he is and I am.
We got married during the second lockdown. We had just two guests at the 15-minute council ceremony, followed by a socially distanced lunch. He wiped away tears as he told me that he would love and support me as my lawful wedded husband and I wiped away tears as I told him I would love and support him as his lawful wedded wife. And we do. Like all couples, we have our moments, but most of the time, we do.
It's more than nine years since Anthony promised me 'unconditional support'. It's three and a half years since we turned that into a legal promise. Anthony was married for nearly 30 years before we met and has three delightful grown-up sons. I had never even lived with a partner. I had an awful lot to learn.
I have always been financially independent, but last year we bought a house together. We have been doing it up. Let me tell you that if you want to test a marriage, throw in noisy building work, dust, mess and deadlines for new carpets when you're doing the painting yourselves. I think we have just about made it through.
There are many ways to live a wonderful life, but I will say this: to be with someone who is on your side, who wants you to be healthy and happy and successful, is a truly remarkable gift. I think I'm extremely lucky to have it. Miranda Hart clearly feels the same.
Christina Patterson is the author of The Art of Not Falling Apart and Outside, the Sky is Blue.
