Jock Zonfrillo wife Lauren Zonfrillo book: Why she started planning their life together days after they first met

I had been single for a couple of years when I met Jock.

One of my friends, Jo-Ellen, had met him at an event, and she said he was the ultimate match for me. She said he was a chef, a champagne ambassador, and European.

When she had called to tell me this, I was in Paris. She sent me some photos from the event, and a screenshot of his Instagram. Zonfrillo was a unique name.

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There he was in a slim-fitting three-piece suit, curly hair, mouth wide open, laughing, looking smoking hot.

When I found out his European type was Scottish, I have to admit I was disappointed. I mean, technically, he’s from Europe, but I had assumed he would be some smooth French or Spanish version.

Little did I know then how much this Scottish-Italian mongrel would fit me.

Jock has told the story of how we met in so many interviews over the years. I fear I’m wasting space in this book writing about it again. I’ll do the short version.

After I had assumed Jo-Ellen would magically hook me up with this chef she barely knew, he left my mind.

Months later I was at my sister Lani’s house for Joel’s birthday, and it was over that dinner I told my family I had given up on dating and men.

The dinner finished late, and it would take me close to an hour to get home, so I jumped in an Uber and started responding to missed text messages and clearing out bad photos on my phone.

Midway through selecting photos for deletion, I came across the screenshot of Jock’s Instagram page. He was still very hot.

I then went into my emails, and saw a Twitter notification about some new followers, and Jock was one of them. Beauty.

So I sent him a message and while I was still in the Uber he replied.

This continued for a few hours, and then in the early hours of Sunday morning we moved to texting and kept messaging until I had to leave at 8 am for a class at the gym with some friends.

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I’ve always believed in a big love. One that would change the course of my life, take me somewhere that just kept evolving and blossoming into something more fulfilling and meaningful as the years rolled by.

Some friends warned me that I was being unrealistic and setting myself up for a life alone.

But it was now Sunday morning and the direction of my life had started to shift, though I had no idea this was occuring – until Tuesday, when Jock arrived in Sydney to take me out for dinner.

We locked eyes for the first time, and it was love at first sight. It took mere days for Jock to tell me he loved me, and we started planning life together.

I had booked in to have my eggs frozen the coming January, and when I told Jock this he asked why I didn’t just go off the pill so we could start trying for a baby.

I had never really thought about having children; I was just freezing my eggs as a safety net, but with Jock I wanted everything, and I wanted it immediately.

The babymaking began two months into our relationship, and four months after that we bought a house together in the Adelaide Hills, three months after that we were engaged, six months after that we were married, and six months after that we had done a successful round of IVF, after trying for a year and a half to fall pregnant naturally, and I was pregnant with our first little baby, Alfie.

My fit with Jock was beyond anything I can even comprehend now.

I knew every day we were together that we were fucking great, but I know it even more now. I just really enjoyed being around him.

On the weekends Jock would let me sleep in and then bring me coffee in bed.

When I was ready to start moving, I’d head downstairs and find him dishevelled in the kitchen, his thick, curly hair going crazy without any product in it to hold it down; he would have Alfie up on his cooking stool with a skewer and a pile of crepes, and Jamie Oliver’s butterscotch sauce simmering away on the stove.

Jock was at his happiest on weekend mornings – he would put on his Scottish playlist, and the kids would know it was breakfast when they heard bagpipes.

We would wander around the house all day in our dressing gowns.

Nothing mattered to Jock on the weekends except being in the kitchen and teaching Alfie how to cook, guiding his hands, showing him what signs to look for before he could turn the crepe.

My boys. My extraordinary life.

When Jock packed up the house for Rome, we sent some boxes airfreight as they were so urgent we couldn’t live without them for more than a week.

His crepe pan and Alfie’s cooking stool were in there along with our coffee machine, grinder and every sized Microplane we owned.

None of our shoes were urgent, apparently, but boy could we cook lots of crepes.

Our little family was Jock’s absolute world; it was like the kids and I were his docking station where he felt safe and understood, and charged back up to get out there.

He used a loud, sweary voice, tattoos and whisky drinking to seem invincible, but it was all just a distraction.

And I have to admit that sometimes I got distracted by that too and fell into letting him be the strong one for me, for us.

So to enter the chaos of grief without him felt like starting below zero, and the work I had to do just to get back to the starting line was immense.

This is an edited extract from Till Death Do Us Part by Lauren Zonfrillo. Published by Penguin Random House, RRP $36.99.

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