Roisín O’Doherty and Elaine Mai first met back in 2004, in NUI Galway’s college gay society, which was then called Pluto. Although they didn’t get together at the time, they stayed friends after they left, eventually becoming a couple in the last few years, friendship blossoming into something deeper. Just over two years ago, Elaine decided to take the plunge with an elaborately romantic proposal. “I had planned it for quite a while,” she explains. “I wanted to do something fun that would throw her off the scent, so made a treasure hunt in Mount Usher Gardens in Wicklow. At the end she found me and proposed, which I’m sure she had twigged at that point.”
“It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realise what was happening,” Roisín laughs. A little longer than Elaine was expecting - “I didn’t eat that morning, thought it was going to take her 20 minutes, it took like an hour and a half. was literally famished.”