The moment I knew: I was crying and couldn’t stop. When he reassured me, I believed in the future he could see

The moment I knew: I was crying and couldn’t stop. When he reassured me, I believed in the future he could see When Tracy Crisp was at her ‘messiest and darkest’, Adrian didn’t diminish her pain, but he did help her look beyond it Find more stories from the moment I knew series I met Adrian when I was 18 and we married when I was 23. I fell in love with Adrian because he made me laugh, he was smart and he looked good in footy shorts. However, what I loved most was that right from the beginning there was no pretence between us. Adrian has always been “what you see is what you get”, and the flipside of this is that he takes everyone at face value. I never had to second-guess who he wanted me to be; I always felt he loved me for who I was. At this early stage of my life – when I was trying so hard to find my place in the world – falling in love with Adrian and making plans for the rest of our lives felt simultaneously safe and exciting. In my 30s, I experienced a few decades’ worth of events in a few short years. Complicated births, a baby’s surgery, secondary infertility; cancer, death and dementia in my family. It was a lot. Then, a few weeks after I had settled my grandfather into aged accommodation and spoken at my father’s funeral, Adrian came home and said he’d been offered a job in Abu Dhabi. In many ways our relationship has been defined by travel. The day after our wedding in 1992 we left on an open-ended backpacking trip; we had always talked about living overseas with our children. So, I packed up my third house in six months – my childhood home, my grandfather’s home and now our home – and in 2009, we moved to a desert city a 12-hour flight away. A few weeks after we landed, I turned 40. Adrian gave me a simple, silver ring and a matching pendant. Whether that move was the tipping point or whether I was headed for an emotional collapse anyway, I can’t know, but my first year in Abu Dhabi was marked by panic attacks in the supermarket and insomnia-filled nig...