From IRC to forever: celebrating 10 years of marriage

Published by

Jade Pang

on

May 19, 2026

Our love story started, as so many unlikely love stories do, with music.

It was 2001. The internet was dial-up, screens were small, and mIRC was where the world met. At that time, I had an IRC script that would broadcast whatever I was listening to, and that afternoon, it was Luna Sea filling the channel.

Somewhere on the other side of the screen, a stranger noticed. He initiated a chat, and just like that, two J-rock fans found each other in the noise of the early internet. We talked about J-rock music the way only fans do, and slowly we became online friends who would chat almost every night.

One year later in 2002, we met in person for the first time at Bugis Street to go hunting for Japanese rock tees. We were just friends then, and we stayed that way for years.

Life moved on the way it simply does. He went to Australia to study, and the distance quietly swallowed our conversations for a while and we stopped talking frequently.

When he came back to Singapore, we started talking again. At first, it was easy and familiar. We picked up where we left off, filling in the gaps of our years apart. At the beginning, we caught up over dinners and plays and parted ways shortly after our meet-ups.

Over time, it became the kind of outings that stretch long past what the evening planned for. Nights would end far later than either of us intended. And even after we returned to our respective homes, conversations spilled past midnight, neither of us quite ready to say goodnight.

Somewhere in between the late-night chats and the easy laughter, something shifted. The air changed in a way that’s hard to name but impossible to miss. We didn’t want to ruin the friendship, so we did not talk about it straight away.

Then one late night, a SMS message lit up my phone, back when phone screens were still black and white. He told me he didn’t want to lose a great girl like me.

We both knew the risk – a friendship that long and hard to come by was not something we would gamble lightly. But we took the leap of faith anyway, and thankfully, we were right to.

We started dating in 2010 and he proposed about two years later.

On 14 May 2016, we got married.

At the wedding dinner that evening, I did something I had quietly planned, and perhaps quietly dreaded. I’m not always good with words, especially the lovey dovey ones, but music has always carried what I can’t say out loud. So I picked up a ukulele and sang 我只在乎你 – Teresa Teng’s gentle, melodious declaration that in a whole wide world, it is only him that matters to me.

Ten years of marriage is not a number that just happens. It is a marriage built out of the fights that we work through because we care more about each other than about being right. It is built out of the seasons when it sometimes feels hard, and we choose to stay anyway.

We have watched each other become. We’ve sat with each other through personal battles, through family heartache, and through the quiet ordinary weight of adult life. We’ve had children together, two small people who, I’m convinced, got the best of both of us. And through all of it, we kept coming back to each other.

Recently, we renewed our wedding bands. We kept the gold that was in our original bands, but added gemstones and diamonds, a little more colour and light than where we started.

Ten years in, we are not the same people who exchanged plain gold bands back in 2016, and these rings feel like an honest reflection of that. Still us, but with a little more sparkle.

What I treasure most, beyond the milestones and the memories, is something simpler: with him, I get to be completely myself, without apology.

Happy 10th anniversary, my love. Thank you for that first message in 2001. Thank you for the SMS in 2010. Thank you for choosing me, and for letting me choose you, again and again. It is a privilege being your friend, confidante, wife and mother to our two children.

Here’s to every year still ahead of us.