Krystian Szemiczek and Lucia Morawska have been a couple since last year, but originally got together in 1995. Lucia, who was born in Poland but grew up in the UK, would go to Poland for summer holidays to see her grandmother, and met Krystian through a friend. She was 14; he was 16.

After Lucia came back to the UK, they would write to each other every month and speak on the phone, but the romance didn’t last and a couple of years later, Lucia ended it. Then, a year or so later, when Lucia went back to Poland they met up and got back together. That didn’t last either. Why not? “I don’t know,” she says to Krystian. “You tell me – you left me.”

He speaks in Polish for a while (he is still learning English), and they laugh. “I left him, then he left me,” she says. “One-all. I was going to uni and it was difficult to live far away, and he didn’t know what he wanted to do. It was just a difficult period, on the verge of starting independent life, I suppose.”

They didn’t see each other again for nearly 20 years. Krystian married and then had a daughter; Lucia did a PhD and became a lecturer and Holocaust photography researcher. Krystian had searched for her on social media, but couldn’t find her. “Always at the back of my mind, I had my first perfect love,” he says.

Lucia, meanwhile, was also thinking about the one that got away. In 2003, she sent Krystian a letter, which for some reason he never received. (He finally read it five months ago.) Then, in 2012, a friend of Krystian’s told her he had got married.

Last summer, Lucia went to Warsaw to do some research and thought she would make one more attempt to get in touch. This time she found Krystian on Facebook and sent a friend request. Krystian, who was on holiday in Spain with his teenage daughter – his marriage having since broken down – replied with a message straight away.

She put down her phone, and thought: “Oh my god – I’ll leave it on the table and read it when I’ve calmed down.’” In his second message to her, Krystian asked if she was married.

Lucia was about to go to Israel for a short trip but when she came back to Warsaw, Krystian met her at the airport. What was it like to see her? “It was like a sudden rush of blood,” says Lucia, translating again. “He felt really hot suddenly and couldn’t walk, his knees buckled, and he felt like he was in a different dimension.” That sounds dramatic. How about her? She laughs. “Pretty much the same.” But they only had 90 minutes together before Krystian had to leave for work. He drove her to where she had parked her car but they got lost trying to get out of the multistorey car park. They laugh at the memory. “I think we were just in shellshock,” says Lucia. “I asked him if he was trying to keep me in the car for as long as possible.” Krystian smiles and nods.

When Lucia was back in the UK they would try to see each other every couple of weeks and they spoke every night. “We talked about the future within the first week of Krystian coming over here in September. That we were going to be together.” He proposed at Christmas and they are getting married in August.

What does it feel like to be together after all this time? Krystian says: “It’s complete happiness and my dreams have finally come true. This is the person I want to be with.” Lucia beams and says: “I still can’t believe it. It’s the happiest thing that could have happened to me.”

Had she always been waiting for him? “I think I was.” She says she always took a photo of them both from the 1990s with her whenever she moved house. “It felt like there was a part of me missing and when we started talking again, I instantly felt like this was the part. This was the person I always wanted to be with – but we were just too young, and too far away.”

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