Chimneyside Chats with OFFICER

by - December 30, 2019

Graphic created by Lucas Seidel Design

Gather 'round the open fire for Chimneyside Chats - a monthly feature with holiday stories from our favorite artists. See what's in their stockings this year as they reminisce on Christmas memories, share their favorite recipe and more! Here's what synth pop duo Moonray had to say:

So here we are: it’s approaching Christmas. Husband and wife, experiencing the scarce luxury of sitting in a hot tub together, toasting anything at all positive we can think of, having just spent the early hours of the morning in the funniest, longest, deepest, most searching one-to-one conversation we’ve ever had together whilst swimming around a lit-up swimming pool we miraculously have all to ourselves… a rare and pretty magical moment of heaven interrupting our lives.

Rewind six years, the first snowfall of the holidays and of the year is happening late at night outside my London flat. Having been together for six months I go out into the untouched snow and write huge across the road ‘Will you marry me? and yell at Jen to come to the window. She looks super happy and excited and torn…

Jen wraps up in her layers and comes outside to join me to play in the snow and says, ‘I want to marry you but I need you to know something, and not just know about it but really think about it and understand the permanent nature of it.’ I ask her what it is and she responds, ‘I never ever want to have children. If you were to spend the rest of your life with me you wouldn’t have any children and I need you to have really thought that through and know where you stand with it.’

I knew Jen’s completely understandable fears around having children and understood and had empathy for where she had come to on it. In that moment I felt I just wanted to say that this was fine and let’s just be together out of our love for each other, but I could see she needed something more than that to feel loved and respected and so I said I would think about it for three months, which I did before proposing again at my favourite place in Ireland - a sublime, sea storm-battered beach on the west coast of Ireland listening to a song I had recorded for and about her. This time she said yes.

Fast forward back to our six-years-later holiday hot tub toasting life session… we’ve now been together through a bunch of triumphs, tragedies, learning curves and generally taking the piss out of each other, and in this hot tub, Jen is unexpectedly pregnant. We clearly didn't pay attention in biology class. We don’t quite know how we journeyed here really, but we’re surprised again by laughter and joy, in fact, we're giddy. Somehow, whilst understanding and living out Jen’s valid reasons for not ever having kids, something along our journey has changed both our lives together and how we experience the world and here we are having a once-unthinkable happiest of holidays.

Just before sunrise at the end of this very night as Jen falls asleep and the first light of dawn came, feeling full of both the beautiful and broken moments of the last number of years, I write a love song called ‘Heavening’ which we, OFFICER, have just released as our new single from our upcoming album, Night Tennis. I’d love you to have a listen to it and share it with your friends and family this holiday season.

Learn more about OFFICER and listen to our Chimneyside Chat playlist!

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