Let me start with a confession. I was not looking for love. I was not even looking for a date. I was looking for someone patient enough to listen to me butcher the English language without running in the other direction.
It was October 2017. I had been in Cork for a few months by then. Long enough to have found my feet, made friends from my English school, started to feel like the city was becoming mine in small ways. I was not lonely. I was not lost. I was just a Brazilian girl in Ireland, living her life, and one evening I downloaded Tinder.
Not for what you think. I promise. I just needed people willing to talk to me outside of school. People who would give me a chance to practice my English in a more natural way, the kind of conversations you cannot have in a classroom. It was less of a dating app and more of a very unconventional language exchange. That was the plan, anyway.
And then I matched with him.
Ivan. A name so common in Brazil that my first message to him was basically: wait, are you Brazilian? Because if you are, this is not going to work. I needed English practice, not someone who would immediately switch to Portuguese and ruin my entire plan.
He was not Brazilian. He was Croatian. And that, completely by accident, is the reason we are still talking today.
He was patient from the very first message. Patient in a way I was not used to. While I searched for words and took forever to finish sentences, he waited. No rushing, no finishing my thoughts for me, no polite impatience hiding behind a smile. Just Ivan, waiting, as if he had all the time in the world and was perfectly happy to spend it watching me figure out the difference between since and for.
I was not easy. I want to be honest about that. He showed up consistently and I gave him very little in return. I was not in the best place emotionally, and I was not ready to let anyone in, so I did what I do when I am protecting myself. I went quiet. Barely responded. Left him on read for days at a time like a person with absolutely no manners.
So I met him. December 7, 2017. A pub called Vicarstown on North Main Street in Cork. I remember it was cold the way Cork is always cold, and I remember walking in not entirely sure what I was doing there.
He was exactly as I expected and nothing like I expected. Shy in real life in a way that surprised me. Not a man who walks into rooms and owns them. Quiet. Genuine. He asked me things and actually listened to the answers. We talked for hours even though my English was still doing its best and sometimes falling slightly short.
And then the evening ended. And he did not try to kiss me.
I know. For some people that is nothing. For me, it was everything. It told me something about him before I had the words to explain what I was looking at. There was no performance. No agenda. Just a man who had a lovely evening and was completely fine letting it end there, quietly, with no pressure and no expectation.
I went home and thought about that for a long time.
We kept seeing each other after that. Slowly, carefully, brick by brick in a way I had never experienced before. I come from Brazil, where feelings arrive fast and loud and I love you can show up after three weeks like it is perfectly normal. With Ivan it was different. He said those words a year and two months in. One year and two months. And when he said them I believed every single one because I knew he had been holding them until he was certain.
He was my safe harbor. Still is.
The man who never believed in marriage proposed to me. We got married in Croatia in 2019, a traditional Croatian wedding on a beautiful day in a country that was his but not yet mine. I had a full Croatian experience and I loved every moment of it.
And none of it, absolutely none of it, would have happened if I had not decided to practice my English on a Tuesday night in Cork with a stranger from a country I had barely thought about before.
Ireland did not just give me a home. It gave me him. And him gave me everything that came after.