From Cyprus to Finland: Married on Friday, Gone by Saturday

When we came home from Cyprus, I think we both felt like slightly different people.

Not completely transformed. Let’s not make it too dramatic.

But definitely a little more worldly, a little less naive and probably a lot more aware that professional football was not exactly the glamorous world people liked to imagine it was.

Hans had learned that a contract didn’t necessarily mean getting paid.

I had learned that a beautiful beach could exist perfectly well next to complete chaos.

And together, we had learned that sometimes the people you meet during the worst circumstances become the ones you keep for life.

Although technically, I was already the more worldly one of the two.

Obviously.

Before Hans and I even got together, I had already lived in Spain twice for six months.

There may have been a Spanish boyfriend involved.

There was definitely a lot of partying involved.

My mother is probably still choosing to believe I was there purely for cultural enrichment.

Let’s leave it at that.

But Cyprus had been different.

It had been our first real adventure together.

And when we came back to the Netherlands, we didn’t exactly take our time figuring out what came next.

Within three months, we got married.

Very romantic.

Very spontaneous.

Very necessary.

The Wedding That Wasn’t Really a Wedding

Most little girls probably imagine themselves walking down an aisle in a beautiful white dress one day.

I apparently imagined signing a piece of paper in a Dutch town hall because my boyfriend had to catch a flight to Finland.

Romance.

We had already done the official signing at the municipality and then celebrated symbolically in a tiny historic building with only a handful of friends around us.

No huge dress.

No enormous party.

No dramatic entrance.

No honeymoon.

Hans promised me that one day I could still have the big white wedding.

The dress.

The party.

The whole thing.

At the time, I probably believed him.

Now?

I am actually incredibly grateful that we didn’t do it then.

Because after almost twenty years together, the guest list would look completely different.

Some of the people who stood beside us that day are no longer part of our lives.

Three people from that tiny group alone have already disappeared from our story.

That is another blog entirely.

But there are also so many people we hadn’t even met yet.

People we found because of football.

Because of America.

Because of moving countries.

Because of children.

Because of loss.

Because of life.

People who became family somewhere along the way.

If we ever do have that big celebration, I wouldn’t want to look around the room and only see the people who knew us at the beginning.

I’d want to see the people who survived the middle too.

And believe me, we gained some incredible people over the years.

We also lost a lot.

That might be one of the strangest things about growing older together.

You don’t just collect memories.

You collect people.

And sometimes you lose them again.

So Why the Rush?

Before getting married in the Netherlands, there was a waiting period after officially announcing your intention to marry.

At some point somebody asked me why we were in such a hurry.

Fair question.

The truthful answer was very simple:

Hans had signed with a club in Finland.

And he had to leave.

But there was another reason too.

One of those unwritten football rules nobody really talks about.

A wife is a partner.

A girlfriend is… a girlfriend.

And yes, there is a difference.

At least there definitely was in the football world we lived in.

When you were married, clubs treated you differently.

You were officially part of the package.

Accommodation, arrangements, communication — suddenly there was a clearer place for you.

As a girlfriend, things could be considerably more vague.

And after all these years around professional football, I have to admit:

I understand why.

I have seen a lot of girlfriends come and go.

Sometimes surprisingly quickly.

Sometimes so quickly I hadn’t even learned the first one’s surname yet.

And yes, there have been occasions where two women were sitting in the same stadium supporting the same player without knowing about each other.

Extremely awkward.

Especially when you have already politely introduced yourself to both of them.

Occupational hazard, apparently.

God knows whether Hans ever attempted that little substitution trick on me.

If he did, the statute of limitations has expired by now.

Although, to be completely fair, maybe I performed a substitution or two myself somewhere in my Spanish era.

We all had a life before marriage.

Moving on.

Our Honeymoon: Schiphol Airport

So there we were.

Newly married.

Young.

In love.

Ready to begin married life together.

And the morning after our wedding, I drove my husband to Schiphol Airport and waved goodbye as he flew to Finland without me.

Our honeymoon was approximately the drive to Departures.

I still had to finish everything connected to Cyprus.

Administration.

Loose ends.

The kind of things nobody puts in the romantic football-wife montage.

Two weeks later, I finally joined him.

And Finland was…

Beautiful.

Truly beautiful.

We arrived in summer, when the days seemed to never end.

There was light constantly.

You would look outside late at night and your brain would insist it was still afternoon.

It was bizarre.

And somewhere in that endless daylight, we officially began our life as husband and wife.

Finland

The strange thing is that Finland is probably the country I remember the least.

Which feels unfair, because visually it was extraordinary.

We lived on a hill.

There was apparently even a special cross-country skiing route so people could get down toward the shops when winter arrived.

That should probably have been my first indication that Finnish winters were not messing around.

The parking spaces had electricity points for the cars because temperatures could get so low that starting your car became a legitimate concern.

Coming from the Netherlands, that felt completely insane to me.

Then there were the moose.

We were warned about them constantly.

Be careful driving.

Watch the roads.

They’re everywhere.

And then I saw one.

Holy cow.

I know that technically a moose is not a cow, but when one of those things appears beside the road, grammar becomes irrelevant.

They are enormous.

Not “large deer” enormous.

More like:

“Why is a prehistoric animal standing next to my car?”

Where we lived, they simply wandered around.

Like this was completely normal.

To the Finnish people, it probably was.

To me, it was National Geographic with road signs.

And Then There Was the Silence

But when I think back to Finland, the moose and the endless summer daylight are strangely not what stayed with me most.

The loneliness did.

In Cyprus, I had people everywhere.

Our home was constantly full.

Teammates came over.

Friends ate with us.

People needed Wi-Fi.

People needed dinner.

People needed somewhere to breathe for a moment.

There was always noise.

Always someone around.

Finland was the complete opposite.

I knew nobody.

I barely spoke to anybody.

Very few people around me spoke English comfortably, and I had no real social circle of my own.

No friends dropping by.

No familiar faces.

No people sitting around our table until midnight.

Nothing.

For perhaps the first time in my life, there was nowhere to hide inside other people’s company.

It was just Hans and me.

And I learned something there that probably became one of the foundations of our marriage without either of us realizing it at the time.

Your partner cannot only be the person you love.

Sometimes they have to become your entire safe place.

Hans became my best friend in Finland.

Not because we sat down and decided that sounded romantic.

But because there was nobody else.

We ate together.

We explored together.

We struggled together.

We figured things out together.

And in a strange way, being so isolated forced us to become a unit.

Cyprus had taught us how quickly strangers could become family.

Finland taught me that when everybody else disappears, you had better really like the person you married.

Luckily, I did.

Most days.

Maybe That Was the Point

I sometimes wonder why I remember so little about Finland.

Maybe nothing spectacular happened.

Maybe after Cyprus, normal life simply didn’t leave the same kind of scars.

There were no dramatic stories.

No unpaid-salary chaos that I can remember.

No police adventures.

No house constantly filled with footballers.

No endless stream of people walking through our lives.

It was quieter.

Smaller.

Lonelier.

And perhaps that was exactly what we needed.

Because Cyprus made us a team.

But Finland made us husband and wife.

More importantly, it made us friends.

And then, just as quickly as Finland had become our life, it wasn’t anymore.

A few months later, we were back in the Netherlands and Hans was playing for a Dutch club again.

That is probably one of the strangest things about football life.

One day you are living on a hill in Finland, learning about car heaters and avoiding moose.

A few weeks later, you are unpacking boxes in the Netherlands and pretending this was always the plan.

New club.

New house.

New routine.

New people.

Completely different life.

There is rarely a gentle transition.

You just go.

And somewhere along the way, you become very good at starting over.

Looking back, maybe Finland was a little preview of what life had in store for us.

A test run, perhaps.

Because about ten years later, we would end up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — where we somehow managed to survive not just one winter, but five years.

So maybe Finland was simply preparing me.

First: moose, darkness and freezing cars.

Later: Wisconsin.

Apparently life likes to repeat a lesson until you finally understand it.

We just didn’t know yet how many times we would have to start over.

But that is for the next story.