I was moving from Canberra seeking freedom. I'd escaped the press gallery and the place where I'd grown up, and which I felt I'd outgrown. I was leaving my mum and dad and striking out on my own.

In the months before my departure, I'd broken up with my girlfriend, given up my rental lease and sold most of my goods. I was 28 and starting again.

But as I pulled up in late November in my old convertible outside my friend's South Melbourne warehouse where I'd be living, I brought two things with me that I hadn't expected: a raging chest infection and a new romance.

Both I'd acquired in the round of farewells and binges that attended my departure.

The romance was with Georgie*. She was staying in Canberra, but already in my mind inhabited the big grey area between one-night-stand and potential long-term mate. The chest infection was from some serious social smoking.

Dosed with Sudafed, I climbed coughing from the car, not certain how I'd survived the drive. The first person I saw coming down the stairs to greet me was my old friend, Andrew.

The second person was a surprise. I'd met her once, years before, at a party. We'd got on well, shared a sneaky smoke on the back stairs, laughed a lot.

Her name was Sally.**

She was just back from London where she'd been living for the previous few years. She was 32 and starting again.

Now we were both in Melbourne to stay. We all chatted on the footpath, moved my stuff inside, then went for dinner. I tried not to hack up too much phlegm. She tried not to double-take at my new buzzcut. We still got on well.

That December was a scorcher, something I had not known Melbourne could deliver. One 40-plus degree day piled on top of another. Andrew, and I lived on the top floor of the double-brick, un-airconditioned warehouse. The windows did not open.

It took two days to heat up to oven-like, then days to become bearable again after each cool change swept up Clarendon Street from the south.

The violence of Melbourne's weather surprised me. Weekdays we spent setting up a new business – a weekly newspaper called The Republican – in the same stifling space where we lived.

We acquired carpet which we nailed to the floorboards, and office furniture and a fax machine which we put by the guinea pig enclosure.

Antibiotics finally cured the bronchitis. On weekends we went out with Andrew's mates, usually including Sally. I helped her move into her new apartment, carried her heavy things. She laughed at my shorts and long socks. I met her mother.

Over pizza one night in St Kilda, we all talked personal philosophies. I said I believed in love, that I wanted to find it and to settle down and have babies.

The blokes at the table chortled, but Sally told me later that much had turned on those words. She called it my "love god speech".

On New Year's Eve, I took her to a party. She wore a sexy black dress and a leopard-print trimmed hat. I called Georgie at midnight to wish her a happy new year. Then I gave Sally a new year's kiss. We kissed for an hour.

In mid-January, Georgie came from Canberra to visit. Moments alone together were hard to snatch with an office being built in the lounge room and the people we'd hired to create a new newspaper going about their business.

Sally and Georgie met for the first time. They didn't click. Then Georgie went away on an international youth exchange. She'd been selected out of thousands of applicants to spend two months on a ship with dozens of other young people, the pride of the Pacific Rim. I had no way of contacting her except by sending letters to the ports where they would stop.

She gave me the itinerary. I could fax the ship, but only in an emergency. We made each other promises: "This thing might go somewhere," we said, and, "Perhaps we could end up together".

We talked about the possibility of her moving to Melbourne when the ship docked in autumn. "It's only two months, how hard could it be to wait for each other?" we asked ourselves. We sealed it with a kiss.

Sally had other plans, and only two months to bring them to fruition. A few days after Georgie left, Sally and I drove down Beach Road together. I told her about the promises I'd made and said I intended to keep them.

Sally told me I shouldn't. I might feel bound by my poor decisions and silly promises, she said, but she was not. Georgie was wrong for me, and she was right for me. Her intention was to win me over.

On the way home, we stopped at a quiet beach. We didn't have bathers or a towel, but we stripped and I swam in my undies. Mine were grey and a little grungy. She laughed at them too.

We lay on the beach to dry off, and talked. Then we kissed. I seemed able somehow to justify this to myself on the basis that kissing was not infidelity. And anyway, I didn't want to break the spell, so Sally and I stayed all afternoon, clinging tight to each other as a baking northerly whipped sand into our eyes.

My feet got so sunburned they blistered. I had to go to the doctor for cream to soothe the pain. Andrew and I set up the computers and discussed how to make a newspaper with our new colleagues and workshopped story ideas. The first edition was due in March.

In the evenings we played so much Tetris that we formed an addiction. When I could tear myself away, I wrote longing letters to Georgie.

But Sally and I kept seeing each other. We kissed in restaurants and on the stairs to the apartment and on the lumpy couch. On the street one night, a passing motorist yelled out, "Get a room!"

We both agreed with the sentiment, but I refused to act on it. By late February, that hot summer was fading into autumn. But I held firm. The tension was unbearable, but there was a line somewhere that I still had not crossed.

As threadbare as my faithfulness had grown, I had vowed to observe it. According to some definitions, I had. And Georgie would be back soon.

One night, after a particularly steamy evening with Sally, I called her after I'd arrived back at my place.

I said I was sorry; I was giving her hopes I couldn't commit to and breaking my promise to Georgie. We should end it, whatever it was, I said.

Sally hung up on me. Then she wrote me a letter full of disappointed passion and impatience and thwarted love. I replied saying I was "flattered" by her feelings but adamant. It did not go down well. She might have called me an idiot.

But Georgie would be back in days and time was running out. Sally asked me to her flat for dinner and fed me lamb backstrap. My remaining resistance crumbled. I stepped smartly over the self-imposed threshold and onto her futon. Two months of scorching summer, it seems, was too long to wait.

A few days later, Georgie's boat docked. I called her from my desk and we chatted. It was an oddly aimless conversation. I was nervous and avoiding the topic. Then it occurred to me: so was she. So I asked: "What about us?"

"I've been thinking of downgrading the role of love and sex in my life," she replied. "Well, that suits me fine," I said. "Because I've found someone."

She paused for a moment, then exploded with relief. "Thank God! So have I! Her name's Madeleine"*.

Georgie's promise to me had melted quickly in the tropical heat. Surrounded by the flower of Pacific youth and on board an isolated ship, she had weakened within days. By the end of the voyage, she and Madeleine were sharing a cabin. They were voted "Best Couple on Board". Their relationship lasted for years.

Unlike the newspaper. We put out just four issues before we were all made redundant and the meagre assets flogged off.

I was left with a Melbourne address and a second-hand computer. And with Sally.

Eleven days after our relationship became official, on Easter Sunday, I asked her to marry me and make babies together. She said yes. Then she told me that, at the unhappiest moments at the end of her stay in London, a voice had sounded unbidden inside her head: "Go back to Melbourne and marry Michael Bachelard".

A happy ending Bachelard and Sally

Three months later, on a drizzly afternoon in June, she did. We've been married ever since. The summer I met Sally, my first summer in Melbourne, was the summer of 20 years ago. This summer is our anniversary.

*Not really

**Yes, really