How many people can say they married their first kiss? How many people can say they married their first kiss after more than 35 years apart?
For PJ McNamara, the story of how he reunited with his teenage sweetheart Maggie Moore is one of those rare tales that seems almost too perfectly timed to be true.
After more than three decades apart, several marriages, children, grandchildren and entirely separate lives, the pair found their way back to one another, and eventually married.
Speaking to Neil Prendeville on air, PJ described the relationship as a second chance at a love that had never quite disappeared.
“It’s great to be able to tell people out there what happiness is,” he said. “And it doesn’t matter what age you are. You deserve to be happy every time.”
Their story began in 1979, when PJ was just 15. He walked into a friend’s house and spotted “a small little blonde lady” with blue eyes.
“I remember when I walked in the door,” he recalled. “I was 15… and later on that evening, I got my first kiss. Oh my God, Neil, I was over the moon.”
The young couple spent time together over the following years, enjoying the innocent romance of rural Ireland in the late 1970s. PJ remembered waiting for Maggie and hiding so they would not be seen together.
“We used to get fish and chips and we used to sit in the ditch and eat,” he said, painting a picture of a teenage romance that was equal parts sweet and mischievous.
In a detail that perfectly captures their teenage romance, PJ always tells Maggie, “I love you from the bottom of my pencil case” a nod to the Beautiful South song, and the fact that she was still in school when their love began.
But life soon intervened. After the death of his grandmother in 1981, PJ moved to Portlaoise to live with his sister. The distance, travel and circumstances of the time meant the pair gradually lost contact.
“We just lost contact with each other,” he explained.
Both went on to live full lives. Maggie married, raised a family and eventually settled in Mallow, while PJ also married and had children. Yet, despite the years apart, he said he never truly forgot her.
Their paths crossed unexpectedly decades later at the funeral of PJ’s biological mother in 2012. As he stood near the hearse, an ex-girlfriend approached him, and behind her stood a familiar blonde woman.
“I said, ‘I thought I knew all the good-looking girls in Portlaoise, but obviously I don’t,’” PJ joked.
“She was standing there again,” he said. “Thirty-five years later, there she was standing there.”
The reunion was brief, and circumstances meant they did not immediately reconnect. PJ even asked for his number to be passed on to Maggie, but the message never reached her.
It was Facebook, rather than fate alone, that finally brought them together properly.
After joining Slimming World and losing around four stone, PJ felt confident enough to post a before-and-after photograph online. Maggie saw the image through a mutual connection.
“She said to Becca, her daughter, ‘That’s my PJ,’” he recalled.
Maggie, who PJ described as a private person, had apparently only ever sent one Facebook friend request in her life.
“And that was to me,” he said. “I answered it, and we arranged to meet up.”
When they finally met again, PJ said he immediately sensed that something special was happening.
“Going to meet her that night, I kind of knew something,” he said. “There’s something more going on in this.”
The emotions were remarkably familiar. “Heart in your mouth, butterflies in the stomach,” he remembered. “You feel as if you were 17 again.”
Or, more accurately, 15 again — the age he had been when they first met.
“That same buzz was there, I mean, she was my first kiss.”
The couple have now been together for 11 years and married in 2019 during a special ceremony at Greenpark, where around 60 people gathered as they exchanged vows at the historic bandstand.
PJ believes that reconnecting later in life has brought a different kind of happiness, one shaped by experience and perspective.
“You can love a lot of people,” he reflected, “but I think you only truly love one person.”
He acknowledged that he sometimes wonders what life might have been like if they had stayed together all those years ago.
“Sometimes me and Maggie, we build castles and knock them down and then rebuild them again,” he said. “I often say to her, ‘What we could have had.’”
But he is careful not to dwell on regret.
“Maybe the time wasn’t right,” he suggested. “Maybe the universe wasn’t right for us at that time.”
Now, after a serious heart attack and a difficult period of recovery, PJ says his appreciation for Maggie and their family is stronger than ever.
“Life is very brittle,” he said. “Sometimes people don’t appreciate that time. But now I appreciate every minute of every day with her.”
Sitting in his back garden with a cup of coffee while Maggie was inside, PJ summed up his happiness simply: “I’m just so happy.”
For a man who once waited in a ditch with fish and chips for his first love, it seems that after 50 years, the wait was definitely worth it.
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