The moment I knew: he arrived at our wedding with a garbage bag full of marigolds
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Getting married was a legal formality for Hayley Hogan and Ivor, who had already been together 17 years. Then on the day, something shifted. In 2003 I was 17 years old and working in a 24-hour restaurant in the middle of Brisbane. I was a first-year art student who took herself far too seriously to become embroiled in a passionate love affair with a 19-year-old bartender with gelled-back hair who wore pointy white leather shoes and a big gold chain over his muscle tee. Or so I thought.
![[Hayley and Ivor at Airlie Beach, Queensland, in 2005. I was still studying film and television and Ivor was finishing a business degree.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/43c5f6e6b00e642eeee51869d432b60e46308368/0_383_2592_1561/master/2592.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
I had notions of becoming some incredible artist in a creative power couple and Ivor completely slid beneath my defences because that wasn’t what he was about at all. Instead, he had this amazing capacity to make me laugh, we could talk for hours with no awkward pauses and I never felt as if I had to show up as someone cool, edgy or artistic. I could be exactly as who I was – which at that point was probably a pretty superficial, horrible person – but he seemed to adore me regardless. Looking back, it allowed me to put down the facade and relax into who I was.
![[Hayley and Ivor in Brisbane, 2006. Ivor was about to throw away his business degree to follow me into the arts (we worked for a film festival for several years).]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/77d758947a23f8737b6a14208fe9127e2917d08f/0_297_2816_1815/master/2816.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
We hid our romance for months and while my ego had me pulling back, he pushed forward. Eventually he told me he had feelings for another girl at work and that was my undoing. In hindsight, I think that was just a very well-played hand on his part. But it worked, I came to my senses, dropped the attitude and was all in.
![[Hayley and Ivor’s wedding day at their house in Ubud, Bali, in 2022.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/320b57d60f7f467bbb3b3310648ed013ff6fef84/0_212_1200_1031/master/1200.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Several years later we were working for my parents who had turned their home into a wedding venue. It was a really cynical introduction to the world of nuptials. We saw it all: the horse and carriage weddings, dove releases, every bell and whistle weddings. And they weren’t all happy endings. We stopped sending anniversary cards out because we kept getting responses that couples had broken up. Because of that I thought we were on the same page: seeing weddings as performative and pointless.
![[Hayley, Ivor, and our dog Dingo in Sayan, Bali, this year.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/165272efef465568f9428c8c501db1eea3ecb5fe/0_681_3024_2934/master/3024.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
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