When Shehara left her teaching job in San Francisco in 2001 she decided to take the summer off while she figured out her future. “I was planning to go back to studying but I wanted some time away first,” she says. In July, she travelled to London with her family for a reunion. “My whole family was going to be there. My sister went out first and I flew later.”
As soon as Shehara arrived, she discovered her sister, Sheana, had met a family friend called Tarique at a party. “She told me she really liked him,” she says. “All week, she was inviting me out with him and some of our cousins. I was third wheeling, but I didn’t mind because it was the first time my sister had been smitten.”
The night before they were due to fly home, Tarique invited them both to join a group of his friends at a pub. He also invited Ed, a former colleague.
“Tarique basically told me he had met this girl and wanted me to be his wingman,” says Ed. When he got there, Ed found himself sitting next to Sheana. “She didn’t like that because she wanted to be near Tarique,” laughs Shehara. “She made me switch seats by standing up and loudly shouting to Ed: ‘You need to speak to my sister.’”
Luckily Ed and Shehara hit it off straight away. “We’d both just left our jobs and we loved travelling,” says Ed. “We had a really interesting conversation.” As they were leaving, Shehara shouted out her email address to Ed from her taxi, but wasn’t expecting him to remember it.
“It was before the days of smartphones and I didn’t have anything to write with,” says Ed. “It was one of those emails that wasn’t her name and I spent so much time trying to remember it, I ended up forgetting her real name,” he laughs. He sent her an email addressed “Dear darling”. “I immediately realised he’d forgotten my name,” says Shehara. “But I didn’t mind as I’m horrible with names too.” Soon after, she told Sheana she would “marry him one day”.
They stayed in contact via email and Ed invited Shehara to return to the UK ahead of his dad’s wedding in Scotland that August. They met in England and toured around Warwickshire, before heading on a road trip around Loch Lomond, the Highlands and the Isle of Skye.
“He was so funny, he made me laugh the whole time,” says Shehara. “I got to see him with his family as well and I saw how much they valued each other.” Ed says it was the ultimate adventure. The trip sealed their relationship and they knew they wanted to find a way to be together.
Ed visited the US at Christmas and then, in February 2002, Shehara moved to Cambridge, where Ed was living with his parents. “After 9/11, it became harder to travel and get visas, so studying seemed like the best option,” she says. “I went to do an MBA at Regent College in London.” Ed worked at a school doing adult distant learning.
They spent two years in Cambridge, before moving to San Francisco in 2003 and getting married. “I proposed to him,” says Shehara. “I made a scrapbook with all of our adventures and on the last page, I made a card that asked him if he’d marry me. After he read it, he didn’t say anything. So I asked: ‘Well?’ He joked that I didn’t do it properly and I should have gotten on one knee.”
Years later, her sister married Tarique. “So we both ended up with the people we met on that trip,” says Shehara. She and Ed now have two children, born in 2007 and 2010. Ed works as a technical sales leader for a security company, while Shehara works as a teacher’s aid at their children’s school.
“We complement each other very well,” says Ed. “I love the way Shehara drives us forward as a family. She pushes me out of my comfort zone and gets me to do new things.”
Shehara admires how sensitive her partner is to other people’s needs. “If there’s a problem, he’ll step in,” she says. “One of the first things I noticed was that he treated me as an equal partner. He’s always supported me whatever I wanted to do.”
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