They got engaged like this.

In Dublin they went to a house party, and walked home along cobblestoned lanes. Celine was twenty-six and Luke was twenty-eight. He was tall and lean and dark-haired, and wore a half-tucked pale blue shirt. She was tastefully ugly: square face, flat black sandals. Although the night was warm, she had gloves on.

Both were fast talkers, but his tone was steady while her own had more vigour. They discussed two of the guests who’d broken up.

‘I don’t think they spoke to each other all night,’ Celine said.

‘Honestly they should have ended it sooner,’ Luke replied.

‘How so?’

‘I mean, break-ups always suck. But they suck a lot less if you end it while you still like each other.’

They went down a street of terraces, opened their red panelled front door, and climbed the rickety communal stairs. Their two-room flat was in No. 23, a subdivided Georgian townhouse. The boiler kept breaking, the main local amenity was the man who sold weed from his Nissan, and rent was two thousand euro per month.

When they’d moved in last year, the landlord had warned them: ‘This ain’t the Ritz, lads.’ Celine faced little difficulty remembering this fact. Their hallway had a coconut mat and brass shoe rack: here you trapped dirt at the entrance, while the Ritz allowed dirt to travel anywhere so long as it paid. Bedroom and bathroom were plain and poky, and unfortunately weren’t the Ritz. The living area contained Celine’s piano and a green-and-yellow kitchenette. There was nowhere to put a table. This wasn’t, please note, the Ritz; so they ate on the couch. 

At the bathroom sink, Celine removed her black leather gloves and rubbed in hand cream. She was a professional pianist, and moisturised only at night to avoid smearing lotion on the keys.

Then she wiped her hands with a tissue and joined Luke in bed. On contact with his body, she let out an Oh, as if him lying there was a surprise.

She resumed the topic from earlier.

‘No one ends a relationship while they still like the other person,’ she said. ‘You think, okay, it’s bad, but it’s about to get good again. Then it keeps being bad till it’s over.’

‘Decide up front,’ Luke said. ‘What’s the worst thing they could do where you’d still like them, but only just. That’s your limit, and if they do it then leave. Or you could use – you know those feedback forms?’

‘Circle 10 for adore new microwave, or circle 0 for dislike new microwave and wish it ill?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m not sure that works for gauging if you’re happy.’

‘Maybe not,’ Luke said.

Celine held back the words: Are you happy, though?

They did not, as a rule, ‘share feelings’. Celine’s family had never taught her how. To see the tint of your internal mood ring as warranting disclosure, and to expect a rapt audience – no, no. Have you met Irish people? But they’d been together for three years, and Celine measured their relationship in clutter. Luke’s battered paperbacks lined the windowsills; he’d procured a coffee grinder and half a cat. The other half was hers, and the asset would be difficult to divide, so hopefully they were in it for the long haul.

Celine turned off the bedside lamp. ‘So what’s your limit? In theory.’

‘I mean, it sounds old-fashioned.’ Luke paused, as if waiting for her to pull out the rest of his words from him. ‘But if I thought we’d never get married. Or that level of commitment. If I knew that wasn’t going to happen, then – yeah. In theory.’

‘When you say it won’t happen, who’s decided?’

‘I didn’t say that.’  

‘If you’re a mindreader, you know that’s going to cause way more problems than it solves.’

‘I didn’t say it won’t…’ Luke trailed off. ‘I mean, but it won’t, though. Marriage will never happen between us. And that’s not a problem necessarily. It would be silly to stop when it’s going well. But we’re not going to end up together.’

A pause, for which Celine felt responsible. The cat mewed from the next room.

Celine said at last: ‘If you really think that, we should break up right now.’

No response from Luke.

She added: ‘By your own criteria.’

Silence.

‘But,’ Celine said, ‘sometimes you say things because you want me to contradict you. And it’s fine if you don’t and you want me to agree.’

Still no answer.

‘Tell me what to say,’ she said.

‘Say what you want.’

‘I guess one of us has to. Like – I think back a lot to when you said you didn’t want a relationship. And I said, eventually I want one with someone, but not a guy I’ve just met, so for now we’re good. Then later I said if you still didn’t want anything serious, we should stop. And you said you’d changed your mind. Sometimes I think you’d always wanted to be with me. You just couldn’t acknowledge it until I did.’

Another pause.

‘If I need to say things aloud before you’ll even say them in your head,’ Celine said, ‘then that’s not my favourite quality of yours. It’s not an aspect I’d bring to a desert island if I could only take three. But I’d still have a hard time choosing. Actually, I’d find it impossible, picking only three things. Probably I love all of you. And I think for me that means I want to be with you forever.’

Then Luke asked. 

The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan (£16.99, Orion) is out 25 May 2023.