Do you remember your first kiss? Maybe you were a teenager full of acne and sporting metal braces? You leant in, his lips met yours and suddenly you realised that this boy was swirling his tongue around your mouth, much like a washing machine.
You’re definitely not alone. I’m a Celebrity’s Julia Morris talks exclusively to The Australian Women’s Weekly of the same kind of trauma and panic she felt as a 15-year-old girl: “I kept thinking: ‘Eew, EEW! He’s putting his tongue in my mouth!”
Lucky for Julia, those awkward days are behind her and she has been very happily married to her sweetheart of 13 years, Dan Thomas.
“Dan was my matching half from night one”, she says. “He’s ruined my stand-up for man bashing because it’s really not true.” She tells The Weekly that her road to romance is a “ballast” of love, support, friendship and a lot of lunging and dry white wines.
Julia and the love of her life, husband Dan Thomas.
How Julia met Dan
It all started at an Aussie expat weekly get-together in London called Club Sunday. “Alcohol would be rising like a spirit level in their eyes and I would probably be out the front chucking, to be fair”, Julia says.
Dan – who unbeknownst to Julia would be her future Prince Charming – had been on his way to a performance when someone grabbed him, put a microphone in his hand and shoved him on to the stage. Secretly, Julia knew that Dan was one of the few eligible bachelors in the room but kept him on the backburner. She thought for a minute: “Ooh, I must kiss you on the lips at some point.”
That was until she saw him embrace the art of cabaret. Most straight men would have awkwardly stood there and whispered “er Goldfinger” into the microphone before planning their emergency exit but not Dan. Much to Julia’s surprise, Dan held his own and belted out GoldFINGEEERRR. (Trust us, words don’t seem to do Julia’s imitation of a man imitating Shirley Bassey justice here!) Julia’s immediate reaction was: “Who is that?”
Much to Julia’s dismay, Dan had to get to a stand-up gig but they ended up reconnecting at Edinburgh Festival. After a few sneaky dry white wines, they eventually got their happily ever after.
“I have a great girlfriend called Fozzie and a great girlfriend called Meg and over the years I thought: why can’t I find a boy who’s a combination of Fozzie and Meg?” Julia tells. “Dan is that boy, that person you can’t wait to get home to tell the story to.”
“As the years go on and you’re raising children there has to be a real ballast of best friend there. Because if anything is going to blow apart, it will blow apart from having kids. If he ever wants to entice me into la boudoir, he just has to unpack the dishwasher. Nothing starts mummy up like all the washing done. Oh you sexy man.”
Keeping the love alive after 13 years
Given how often dry white wine rates a mention in Julia’s stories, you’ll be surprised to know that she barely touches alcohol these days. “I’m a chucker”, she says.
This very fact means that Julia and Dan have had to get more creative with their date nights. “If you’re not two drinkers that are out there, then what do you do? How do you reconnect?” Julia says. They ended up deciding on dance classes but as their first class loomed, Julia found herself dreading it.
“On the first day I was like, ‘I’ve got to go that bloody class’.” But when she stepped in front of Dan, something transformative happened.
“There was this intense moment, because I don’t remember the last time I’ve stood opposite my husband and looked him in the eyes when he feels vulnerable and I feel vulnerable, and you’re restrictively touching each other, there’s this reconnection moment” she says.
“You’re having to move and mirror each other’s body, you become aware of that person. The only time you’re aware of that person is if they’ve emptied the dishwasher or not. So we stopped talking about who picked up the dry-cleaning and started talking about our hopes for the future, or where we see ourselves… those conversations you never get around to. It was like slow-mo in a film.”
Julia’s trying her hand at match-making
Like us, you probably think that Julia and Dan’s love story makes her the obvious choice for the reboot of match-making game show Blind Date where Lady J-Mo has to host and guide lovelorn contestants through the forest of love. She will even be writing some material herself with the help of the lovely team at I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.
“It’s an odd environment to find the love of your life, so humour makes people feel more comfortable about that”, Julia says. “I always start with overnight romance and see if it folds out from there. It’s probably not a great way to go forward. I think a lot of the questions are designed to get funny answers like, “If you were a spirit animal, where would do your poo-poos?”
She says that if she ever found herself on a dating show that she would reverse engineer it to find her way to Dan. “I’d want to hear humour, to hear them making fun of themselves. I’d want to hear gentility. I’m trying to think of Dan’s qualities and work back from there”.
