I met Aoife on a wet Thursday evening outside Whelan’s, both of us pretending we were waiting for friends and not sheltering from the same hard Dublin rain. She offered me half her umbrella because, as she said, “You look like a man losing a fight with the weather.” I laughed harder than the joke deserved, and she smiled like she had decided something about me already.
We were twenty-six then, both working jobs that sounded better than they felt. I was in a marketing office near Grand Canal Dock, spending my days writing cheerful lines for products I didn’t care about. She was a nurse in St James’s, carrying other people’s pain home in her shoulders. Our first proper date was in The Long Hall, where she told me she didn’t believe in perfect love, only in people who kept choosing each other when it became inconvenient.
That line stayed with me. Maybe because I was the kind of person who ran when things became inconvenient. My father had left when I was young, and I had grown up thinking love was something that slowly packed a bag before you noticed. Aoife knew this without me saying it plainly. She had a way of listening that made silence feel safe.
One September night, after nearly three years together, we walked out to the Poolbeg Lighthouse. It was one of those rare clear nights when Dublin seemed to have been rinsed clean. The city lights shimmered behind us, the sea moved black and quiet on both sides of the wall, and above us the stars looked close enough to make you foolish.
Aoife had been offered a place on a specialist training programme in Cork. It was everything she wanted, the kind of chance she had earned through years of double shifts and missed birthdays. I should have been proud without complication. Instead, I felt the old fear rise in me, childish and sharp. I asked what it meant for us. She stopped walking and looked out at the dark water for a long time.
“It means we decide,” she said. “Not tonight for the rest of our lives. Just tonight for tomorrow.”
I remember the wind lifting her hair across her face. I remember a ship horn somewhere beyond the bay. I remember wanting to say something grand and brave, but all I managed was, “I don’t want to lose you.”
She took my hand and put it inside the pocket of her coat with hers. “Then don’t disappear before I’ve even gone.”
That was when I made the promise. Not a proposal, not a dramatic speech, just a small vow under a wide sky. I promised I would not let fear make my decisions for me. I promised I would visit, call, argue honestly, and not punish her for having a life that was bigger than me. She promised she would not pretend distance was easy just to protect my pride.
For the first few months, we were good at it. I took the train down after work on Fridays with a backpack and tired eyes. She met me at Kent Station with coffee and a grin. On Sundays, I came back to Heuston feeling hollow but proud. Then winter came, and with it the small cruelties of distance. Missed calls. Shift changes. My jealousy of colleagues whose names I heard too often. Her exhaustion with having to reassure me after twelve hours on a ward.
One night in February, we had a terrible phone call. I accused her of drifting. She accused me of measuring love by availability. Neither of us shouted, which somehow made it worse. After we hung up, I walked from my flat in Rathmines all the way to Sandymount Strand, angry at her, then angry at myself, then simply sad.
The tide was out, and the city was glowing at the edges. I looked up and saw only a few stubborn stars through the clouds. I thought about that night at Poolbeg and realised I had misunderstood my own promise. I had treated it like a spell, something that would protect us from difficulty. But a promise is not protection. It is work you agree to do when the easy feeling leaves the room.
I rang her the next morning and apologised properly, without trying to win the argument after losing it. She was quiet, then she cried, and then I cried too, standing outside a Centra with people stepping around me. We decided to stop pretending we were fine and start being specific. We planned visits less romantically and more honestly. We told each other when we were lonely before it became resentment. Some weeks were still hard. Some weeks love felt less like a song and more like laundry, train timetables, and choosing kindness while tired.
A year later, Aoife finished her programme and came back to Dublin. Not for me,
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
