Marriages and engagements: ‘My father received Tristan’s amorous text message’

With the confusion resolved, an awkward first date ensued. But it was the summer term and not long after this the holidays began and Tristan moved to Vermont for a year as a part of his course.

“Things hadn’t progressed very far by that point,” says Anita, but when Tristan got back to England, he started e-mailing her.

“Once we got back to university, I knew that I wanted to start seeing her again,” he said, and they have been together ever since.

However, mistaken identity is a theme in Anita and Tristan’s relationship. Not long after they started dating, she went on a family holiday to Kent and texted Tristan using her father’s mobile phone. Not realising this, he sent her an amorous message later that night, which Anita’s father then discovered at 6am.

“He hadn’t met my parents at that stage,” she says, but fortunately her father has a good sense of humour: “He let Tristan squirm for a while, but they now get on very well.”

Tristan describes Anita as “fun and compassionate”, adding that “she’s got some odd Irish ways from her mother. She calls eggs something strange. Expressions pop up every now and then, I can’t help but laugh,” he says. “Oh, and she’s argumentative,” although Anita points out that it is part of her job to be like that.

She says she loves his “passion for life” and love of travel. Both of them grew up internationally: Anita in Ireland and Australia and Tristan in Belgium and Buenos Aires. His parents were expatriates, which gave them a good excuse to go on some long trips around the world over the past years.

Their friends had been telling them to hurry up and get married, and Tristan finally asked the question in June this year. “Everyone assumed we would marry next,” he says. But he managed to keep the proposal a surprise from everyone except one of his ushers — “I had to have someone to talk to” — and Anita’s father.

“The plan had been to propose on her birthday, but we were both away at the time. I had bought the ring nine weeks beforehand and had hidden it under my bed. Every morning I woke up and thought I wanted to do it then, but I knew it had to be special.”

So with a hotel room booked and a table reserved at Pied à Terre, Tristan gave Anita an hour and a half’s notice to “put on a posh frock” and get ready to go.

Distracted by the excitement and the fact that “it was one of those days where I hadn’t put on any make-up”, she didn’t twig what might come next. “He proposed while everyone else in the restaurant was quiet,” she says. “People pretended not to hear, it was very British.”

They will marry in St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Suffolk, where Tristan’s mother works as the dean’s secretary, on June 5, Anita’s birthday, next year.