Liora Ntembe & Tavian Maseko

The first thing Tavian asked me was whether the book in my profile photograph was any good. It wasn't. I had been carrying it around for three weeks because the cover was beautiful and I wanted to be the sort of person who finished difficult novels. I told him that, expecting the conversation to become awkward.

He replied, “Good. I was about to pretend I had read it.”

That was our beginning on WaBanja. No dazzling introduction. Two people admitting they were willing to be impressed by a nice cover.

At the time, I worked in the office of a small training centre. My day involved attendance sheets, missing receipts and explaining why an email needed a subject line. Tavian managed deliveries for a furniture workshop. Our working hours overlapped badly. When I was free, he was usually waiting for a customer who had promised to arrive “in five minutes” half an hour earlier.

We wrote to each other in the gaps. He asked questions that were small enough to answer properly. What did I eat when I was too tired to cook? Which errand could ruin my mood? Did I genuinely enjoy walking, or did I mean walking somewhere that sold snacks?

Tavian suggested lunch on a Wednesday. Forty minutes. Somewhere public near both our workplaces. It sounded unromantic enough to be possible.

He arrived holding two bottles of water because he hadn't known what I would want to drink. I had bought lunch for myself because I hadn't wanted the meal to become a complicated negotiation. We ate separately purchased food on the same bench and discussed a dog that kept walking past us with the confidence of a property owner.

The next Wednesday, we met again. Then the one after that. We tried a different bench because the first had no shade at noon. He brought a cushion once, which I teased him about until I sat on it. Our lunches became the one part of the week that nobody could improve by adding an agenda.

There was a danger in how easy those forty minutes felt. I started imagining that the rest of a relationship would be equally neat. We would talk, laugh, check the time and leave before anything difficult appeared.

Then my father came to stay with me while repairs were being done at his house. My evenings disappeared into cooking, family errands and listening to him explain repairs I could not afford to understand. I answered messages late. Tavian asked if I wanted to meet on Saturday, and I sent a tired reply that sounded much sharper than I intended.

He stopped asking for a few days. I took that personally. He thought he was giving me space. We managed to have our first argument without either of us naming it as an argument.

On Wednesday, he was already at the bench when I arrived. There was no cushion and no easy joke. I remember that because I suddenly wanted both.

“I don't know what you need when you're overwhelmed,” he said. “I can guess, but I seem to be guessing badly.”

I had been preparing a speech about feeling neglected. Instead, I admitted that I wanted him to keep asking, even when I said no. That sounded unreasonable when I said it out loud. He admitted that repeated invitations felt like pressure to him. Neither of us had been trying to hurt the other. We had simply carried different instructions into the same room.

We agreed to say what kind of reply we could manage. A quick message could mean a busy day, rather than an invitation to invent a whole story about the other person. If we needed quiet, we would ask for quiet. It was a modest agreement. Keeping it took practice.

As we began meeting outside our lunch breaks, there were less charming discoveries too. He liked to settle a disagreement immediately. I needed time before I could explain why I was upset. I could be brisk when worried about money. He could make a joke when he was uncomfortable and leave me feeling that I hadn't been heard.

The difference was that we had somewhere to return to. We knew how to sit together without filling every silence. We had already learned that affection could survive a slightly awkward conversation on an ordinary Wednesday.

The photograph was taken months later, during a family afternoon outside. I wore the green dress because it was comfortable enough for sitting on the grass. He had arrived in his striped polo with a bag of bread rolls under one arm. Someone asked us to move closer, though there was hardly any space left between us.

Just before the picture, I reminded him that he had never finished the book either. He leaned in to tell me that abandoning it remained our first successful joint decision. That is why I am smiling quite so broadly.

We still meet for lunch when we can. We have missed Wednesdays. There have been rainy ones, rushed ones and one when I spent most of the time looking for a receipt in my bag. The bench isn't a monument, and we haven't carved our names into it.

It is simply where I learned that I could tell the truth about a small disappointment and still be wanted. Tavian says it is where he learned to ask a better question than “Are you fine?” We sometimes take those lessons home with us. On the days we forget, there is usually another Wednesday coming.