Essex Love Stories: Brogan and Mike

Brogan Gallagher (BSc Psychology, 2017) and Mike Dye (BSc Sports Therapy, 2017)

I met Mike on moving in day October 2014, when we both moved in to Flat 11, Rayleigh Tower. I remember that my parents spoke to him in the kitchen before I did, and apparently they had already decided from that conversation that I was going to like him. Turns out they were right.

We spent our first year getting to know each other, distracting each other in the library when we should have been writing our essays last minute, and drunkenly eating midnight feasts together in our dirty shared kitchen. We became an official couple when he asked me to be his girlfriend at the Summer Ball at the end of first year. It was very romantic. 

During the next two years at Essex, we lived in a shared house with our friends, went on regular dinner dates to Frangos, snuck into each other’s lectures just to spend more time together, and very quickly realised that we couldn't go to the library together because we weren't getting any work done. Dissertation season was spent sitting on different floors of the library and meeting at the bus for a chips and gravy break. We did everything together at Essex. It meant that I had the best experience, because I had someone to share it all with. 

We decided that neither of our hometowns (London and Cambridge) were affordable to live in, so we picked a new place to start our life together and moved to Nottingham after graduation. We've been here ever since and are in the process of buying our first house together.

We often wonder what our lives would have been like if we had picked our second choice uni, or a different accommodation. Maybe we'd never have met? Who knows. But we're very grateful to Essex and to fate that we did.