Sarah Maloney says she knew she loved Jake while the pair were babysitting her younger siblings, when she walked into the lounge room and found him in a bright-orange tutu, spinning like a ballerina to make her little sister laugh.
Neither of them noticed her standing in the doorway, she writes. In that moment, Maloney says she came to terms with a sudden feeling of certainty in her chest.
Later that night, lying in the dark, she told Jake she loved him. The words, she recalls, flew out before she could stop them. He whispered that he loved her too, and hearing him sound so sure made her cry.
The realisation came roughly two months into a relationship that began in 2017, when Maloney was 16 and attending an all-girls Catholic school in Melbourne.
She had little patience for teenage boys at the time, she says, and instead spent much of her gossip time lamenting Jake, who had broken her heart in primary school before moving hours away.
When a debutante ball approached, a tradition she describes as expensive and fundamentally at odds with her values, she accepted that she could not turn down a pretty dress and dancing. Friends asked cousins or co-workers from their part-time jobs to be their partners, but Maloney was knocked back by everyone she asked.
Her mother then volunteered that Jake had moved back to town and offered to ask his mother whether he would be willing. He accepted.
Over weeks of rehearsals her mother would collect him on the way to the dance hall, and the two would sit in the back seat catching up on the past five years. Their giggling during practice drew more than one disapproving look from their teacher, she says.
At the ball the pair skipped the dancefloor for a couch in the foyer and stayed there all night talking, missing dessert. Maloney says she could not summon the courage to kiss him, but he asked her to see a movie with him the next day.
That first date, at the local cinema and under a curfew, brought her first kiss, one that nearly chipped her tooth.
The early months were filled with nonstop texting through the day and after-school visits with her bedroom door left wide open. Maloney says she was surprised by how earnest he was, and that she never felt she had to pretend to be a cooler version of herself.
She recorded in her diary at the time that she was excited to finally have her “ill-fated teenage whirlwind romance”, reasoning that if she held on to the idea they would break up, then she would not get hurt.
On the babysitting night, the plate her sister dropped shattered across the tiles, and by the time Maloney rushed out from her shower, Jake and her sister were already cleaning it up together and giggling. She retreated to the bathroom with relief, she writes, because being good with her siblings mattered to her.
Nine years on, the relationship she once expected to be short-lived has lasted.
Maloney says the pair make each other laugh more than anything else, often falling into comedic improv bits and bickering like old people for the fun of it. “It’s safe. And it’s home,” she writes.
She adds that while being with the same person since the age of 16 might seem crazy, she holds that “kids are dumb, not stupid”. She says she knew then what she knows now: the right person will show up even if it seems too early, and you grow together.
Guardian Australia is inviting readers to share their own stories of the moment they knew they were in love.
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