Love Changes a Man

Love Changes a Man is a captivating, true-life romantic drama that proves true love knows no boundaries. The narrative focuses intently on a turbulent and transformative two-year period in the life of Robert Dunn. What begins as a chance encounter with the woman who would become his true love quickly evolves into a high-stakes, real-life adventure stretching from the UK to the Middle East. Navigating complex external obstacles, family expectations, and unexpected logistical hurdles, Robert finds himself undergoing a profound internal transformation. The ultimate testament to their enduring bond is a rare and extraordinary feat: defying the odds to marry each other not just once, but twice, within four months. Written decades later following a lifetime of philanthropy, this heartwarming memoir captures the humor, resilience, and sheer determination required to secure a lifelong love.

Prologue

Tehran, Iran. 1977

Tension hung in the air like a threatening thunderstorm. A combination of anxiety, uncertainty and nervousness emanated from the crowds that had gathered. A teenage girl weeps as she gives her twin brothers final hugs. They cry too, as do her sisters, one older, one younger, whom she hugs next, and then she turns to her father. He wraps his strong arms around his precious daughter and with his eyes glistening with tears, holds her locked in his arms. Both are full of mixed emotions. When will he see her again? Re-assuring promises had been made, however, the country’s unrest could and would, unravel those assurances. He then kisses her intensely on her forehead before releasing her.

Her auntie steps forward and places a necklace holding a dark red akik stone, over her head. This will give her protection from the bad eye and fulfil her wishes.

Finally, the girl turns to her mother and bursts again into uncontrollable crying. She is shaking as she enters her mother’s open arms. Her mother says some comforting words and hugs her. The girl feels safe wrapped within the folds of her mother’s chador. At that moment, she could stay there forever. Their serenity is broken by a tannoy announcement in Farsi, then repeated in English. The two step away from each other and make eye contact. Both try to smile despite the tears. The girl picks up her bags, turns and walks away.

She is still crying as she joins the throng of other saddened people going towards the Departure Gate at Mehrabad International airport on the outskirts of Tehran. Her Iran Air flight IR711 to London, England is on time and will arrive at Heathrow airport at 8.00am the next day.

She is to follow in the footsteps of her older sister, who had returned from England six months earlier. She is to study English, then take her A levels in order to enter university. She’d always been good with figures and hoped to gain a degree in mathematics.

Little did she know she would never go to university and that her plans would disintegrate through no fault of her own.

Chapter 1

In the beginning, falling in love is an intricate game of acceptances. Love at first sight is a myth. It’s a strong magnetic attraction based on looks. If you see a fantastic garment on a mannequin in a shop window, you may say that you love that outfit and you must have it. However, you would be irresponsible to simply handover your credit card and purchase it. It might not fit, be too expensive, the feel of the material not what you expected and it might even make you itch.

Similarly, falling in love is an evaluation. True in most cases, there needs to be a physical attraction to start the game of love and I have compared this game to one of ‘Snakes and Ladders’.

Each piece of information, or observation, we learn, or notice about a person from the smallest little quirk to the biggest show-stopper, places us on the path to a relationship. Euphoria, infatuation and then love at the top. The facts and idiosyncrasies we learn about a person are either so small, or irrelevant, that we just accept them and it doesn’t change our feelings, or quite the opposite. Something positive increases the attraction and we rapidly climb the ladder upwards, whereas something negative reduces the attraction and we slide equally fast down the snake. The length of the ladder or snake varies with the impact of the emotion we feel.

I knew, or convinced myself, that I had won my game of ‘Snakes and Ladders’. Well, I would, wouldn’t I? But life isn’t straight forward. It throws spanners, and big ones too, into the works and not just once. Little did I know how life changing it would be for me over the next two years.

I was thirty-five and madly in love with a gorgeous alien. Not from another world, though it might appear that way. No, she was a foreigner from the Middle East, Iran in fact. A country that had been through a revolution five years earlier and for the last four years in a long suffering, bloody war with Iraq.

It was August, 1984 and I was intoxicated with happiness. Her name was Sedigheh Salahi, not an easy pronunciation and that’s probably why her friends called her Sedi. She was petite and had long flowing dark auburn hair off her shoulders. Her face was small with an exotic Middle Eastern look. Her eyes were dark brown and her flawless skin lightly tanned. Her petite 5ft (1.5M) frame with her hour-glass figure was a very tall ladder that I shot up. She had small hands and her nails were long yet perfectly manicured. Sedi was vivacious and when she spoke with her foreign accented English, I just wanted her in my arms close to me.

Whilst I was at work, I couldn’t stop thinking about her though one thought in particular, kept coming to mind. How much do I love her? Lots and lots of course, but how far was I willing to go for her love? Many years later, the American singer Meat Loaf sang a song entitled “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that”. It didn’t stipulate in the lyrics what “that” was, but now, as I recall these events, I could have easily applied it to my situation then. What was I prepared to do to marry this wonderful alien?

Could I travel to war torn Iran under a strict religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini, with the Revolutionary Guards patrolling the streets, to meet her parents and family; could I have an Iranian wedding in Tehran, whatever that entailed; learn to speak Farsi, the Persian language; even change my religion with its Arabic prayers and be circumcised! That song springs back into my mind “I would do anything for love, but I won’t be circumcised”.

I smile to myself, for that is my one saving grace. I had been circumcised as a baby, after a urinary problem when I was only a few months old, but what if I hadn’t been? I had heard it was excruciatingly painful in adulthood which lasted for months and no sex either. I wonder how many men would volunteer to be circumcised to prove their love. Would I? Could I? Not likely, so the song with the apt lyrics still stands. I would however, do everything else, well almost!

I was well up in my game-of-love board despite sliding down some very long snakes. Fortunately, I had avoided the ‘circumcision’ snake, which would have sent me right to the bottom! I did slide down the “I am Iranian” snake when she first told me, as the UK’s propaganda machine portrayed them as terrorists. Also, I slid down the “I am a Muslim” snake a few levels, but the more I found out about Islam, I easily climbed back up the board.

I had been baptised into the Catholic Church. I had even been an altar boy. I would however, change my religion because I saw the many similarities between Catholicism and Islam. They both saw Noah, Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon as prophets. Islam sees Jesus and Muhammad (peace be upon him) as prophets, whereas Catholicism sees Jesus as the son of God, which I always had difficulty with. Both believe in the Old and New Testaments, with Islam having an additional book, the Quran, which is a book of life. A book that guides you through the many different circumstances throughout one’s life. In Islam, a man is permitted to have four wives. Not that I was planning on having four wives, but should I venture along that suicidal path, I would have to treat each one exactly the same. I should observe Ramadan and not eat or drink during daylight hours for thirty days and to donate the money I saved through my abstinence to the poor. However, if you are unwell or travelling, then you are not expected to fast. Common sense really.

There are two instructions in the Quran that I had great difficulty with, and these were eating bacon and drinking alcohol. I read that it is harmful to eat pork, which it was, when the holy book was written, and here in England there was an old saying that you shouldn’t eat pork when there is no ‘R’ in the month, meaning no pork between the beginning of May until the end of August, the summer months. It would have made a great deal of sense in a very hot country in the 7th century, but now, with refrigeration and more importantly, since I have been eating pork all my life without harm, I have difficulty convincing myself that it is detrimental to my health. As regards imbibing in alcohol, all religions condemn drunkenness for obvious reasons, but the odd glass of beer! These thoughts I will have to confront in the future, but for now, I will submerse myself in the euphoria of love.

Chapter 2

It was a glorious summer’s evening in July when we met for the first time in Ashton Gardens in Lytham St Annes, a small pretty seaside town in Lancashire, England. I say met which really is a stretch of the imagination, because all I came out with was “Hi, could you look just a little to your left, head up slightly, that’s great” and all Sedi would have seen was a body with a camera for a face. I was at my Thursday night photographic society club meeting. Sedi was wearing a pair of light mustard-coloured dungarees which were rolled up to the middle of her calves, a pale yellow short-sleeved T-shirt underneath and white stiletto shoes. Her beautiful tanned complexion completed the view through my lens. Sedi had been invited by Amanda, one of our members, to be a model at our annual outdoor photo session. We normally have two models to take the pressure off both of them. The other model called Stephanie, in contrast, had long straight blonde hair and wore a long red dress with red sandals. Sedi and Stephanie posed in front of a flowerbed, a tree, on a wall, beside a fountain, or any other unique location around the park that would provide a winning backdrop to these two beautiful girls. Each member was keen to snap that winning photo. We were all clicking away with our top of the range Canon or Nikon analogue cameras, each coaxing a model into a pose at the same time. With some twenty-five members, it was chaotic to say the least.

As was customary after our Thursday weekly meeting, some of us would retire to the local hostelry for a pint. It would have been discourteous not to invite the two models as a ’thank you’ for their patience in putting up with us. Amanda brought Sedi in her white mini, whilst Stephanie came by herself in her own car.

There would have been around eight of us members who extended our meeting into the pub. The others were declining, in favour of Ovaltine, and an early night. After buying our drinks, we found ourselves standing in small groups in a fairly crowded bar, all the seats being occupied. I joined a group of members who were discussing the technical side of the evening’s photo session. We discussed focal lengths, apertures sizes, and timing exposures of each captured potential winning photo. After a while, my concentration drifted, and I found myself looking beyond the members facing me to where Amanda and Sedi were standing and laughing. What a lovely smile. I just had to go and join them. Amanda noticed me approaching and put out her arm towards me to welcome me, and introduced me to her friend.

Amanda then left us soon after to visit the ladies washroom, and fortunately for me, was caught up in another conversation on her way back. Meanwhile, we had found two vacant stools to sit on. Our topics of conversation followed an inevitable path and would last until closing time. It started with her accent, and I couldn’t guess where she was from. Then, I enquired as to how long she had been in this country. She revealed that she had come as a student to study mathematics in 1977, but first to learn English. I complimented her on her ability, but she replied that it is a very difficult language to learn and gave me two little anecdotes. The first was when at a friend’s house she offered to “peel the peas” when in fact, it should have been “pod the peas” and another when she won a game of bingo in a village hall and stood up and shouted “Home! Home! She giggled as she recalled the memory of that winning game. I reflected upon my language’s complexity rather than her inability to grasp its nuances.

The conversation turned serious when she told me about her country’s revolution in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini became the supreme religious leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran after deposing the Shah, thus ending 2,500 years of kingship. Her family had been forced out of their comfortable home where she grew up, and were now living in a more moderate house. Her father had lost several small businesses, though he was allowed to keep his ice factory and garage repair business, of which her brothers were now helping to operate. Her last contact with her family had been shortly after the revolution, when Saddam Hussein, the leader in Iraq, seeing an opportunity now that most of the Iranian generals had been executed on Khomeini’s orders, had declared war on Iran. Her last conversation on the phone with her father, she recalled, had been when he told her to try and remain in the U.K. as there was nothing to come home to. That had been five years ago. Sedi’s eyes watered on that last recollection.

It was time for another drink, and to give her time to recompose her feelings. Upon my return, she had done just that and greeted me with an understanding smile. She asked me about the photographic society, and how long I had been involved. The change in conversation was visibly perking her up again.

The pub numbers were increasing and so was the noise level. We leaned towards each other in order to hear one another. I didn’t want to shout, so I would put my head to the side of hers, where I could feel her soft flowing hair against my cheek, and inhale the scented aroma of her freshly washed hair, and speak without shouting. She would do the same, and this willingness to engage, to want to get close to me, had an electrifying effect upon me.

Before we realised it though, the landlord was shouting “last orders please”. In those days, pubs could not serve alcohol after 11pm. Amanda came over and Sedi rose to leave with her. I stood and said that it had been great to meet and chat with her, and hoped to see her again soon. Sedi smiled again and said “I hope so too”, then turned and followed Amanda whilst I sat down and finished my drink. I glanced at the empty stool where only moments ago, I had been in the company of a gorgeous girl. Would I see her again? Reassuring myself with the knowledge that I knew Amanda, and Amanda knew Sedi. I would reminisce for a week on our encounter and ask for her address at next week’s meeting.

Chapter 3

Come on Thursday! Stop dawdling. I need you here now. Time takes forever when you are impatient. When it finally arrived, I had my plan in place. I wouldn’t go to the pub after, I would go to Sedi’s address with a bottle of bubbly and suggest we drink in and chat. But what if Amanda wasn’t there or Amanda wouldn’t give me her address, or Sedi wasn’t in when I called, or worse still, she was with somebody. I was feeling very anxious when I walked into our photographic meeting.

Whoa! There she was sitting next to Amanda and smiling at me as I entered. I must employ plan B quickly, but I didn’t have a plan B.