‘There’s risk in everything, right?’ The serendipity and agony of dating your neighbour

Finding love across the back fence or apartment corridor is a high risk, high reward proposition. Convenient? Yes. But also, potentially, mortifying

One night, Hayden Starr returned home to find his neighbours having a party. He lived in an apartment complex in Canberra, with only one other unit on his floor, its front door just a metre apart" from his own. Keen to see who lived there, he invited himself in.

I grabbed a cheap bottle of wine I had lying around, go in and see this delightful, lovely girl," he says. And that's how I met Sophie. It was her party, but we ended up spending ages chatting and she tells me all these crazy stories. After that I was like oh man, there's something about this girl. There's something about this neighbour of mine.'"