I didn’t want to get married. Pregnancy changed everything.

Then, in 2014, I she got pregnant unexpectedly. When I saw the two lines appear on the pregnancy test, I was absolutely terrified of what was to come. Having a child was a lifelong commitment – something I had always shied away from.

Getting pregnant changed the way I felt about commitment

At that point, Sam and I had been together for eight years. One evening, I was sitting on the couch in our 1950s two-bedroom apartment when Sam casually asked me if marriage was something I would consider right now. To my surprise, I said I would. I loved Sam and knew he was the one for me. I wanted to have one too same last name as our child.

A few weeks later, Sam told me to be ready by 5.30pm. He was taking me to dinner. He seemed a little flustered when he got home from work, but I didn’t put two and two together.

I was driving along the coast in Black Rock, Melbourne, where I lived at the time, when Sam cleared his throat. “Hey, I’m a little early for dinner and wanted to show you something,” he said. “Someone told me about this place called Poets’ Corner, where locals leave poetry. Let’s go check it out.”

Sam’s not really a poetry reading guy, so at that point I started to feel a little suspicious. I parked and started walk along the beach path to the Half Moon Bay lookout, my heels digging into the sand, the salty wind whipping my hair.

I could tell Sam was feeling nervous and suddenly my heart started beating faster in my chest. “There he is,” he said. Beside a picnic table overlooking stormy Port Phillip Bay was a black leather satchel with the word “Poetry” written on it. “Why don’t you look inside?” he said.

I smiled and opened the schoolbag and at the top of the pile was a pink framed envelope with a card inside. I immediately recognized Sam’s shaky handwriting. He had written a poem telling me how much he loved me and had somehow slipped it into his satchel so that he would be there waiting for me.

We have been married for almost 10 years now

At the end, he wrote: “You are the girl of my dreams. Will you be my wife?” When I came back, Sam was on his knees, holding a sparkling diamond ring. His eyes glistened with tears.

“Yes, I will,” I said, bursting into tears and wrapping my arms around him. At that moment, my commitment fears disappeared for good and all I felt was happiness that I had found my special person in this world, the one to spend the rest of my life with.

Later that evening, we went out to an amazing dinner and called our family and friends to share our happy news. They all joked that it had been a long time.

Three months later, we were married at a vineyard on the Gold Coast. I will never forget waking up first thing in the morning after the wedding and saying, “Good morning, husband.” It felt surreal and weird, in a good way.

Getting pregnant changed my perspective on marriage and helped me think differently about the future. I had worried that marriage might change the way Sam and I felt about each other or make the relationship prematurely stale, but the reality was the opposite. Taking these vows solidified our feelings and made us stronger as a couple. The formality of being married made all the difference and almost 10 years later we are still going strong.