It’s a thoroughly modern love story, in other words, with salutary lessons for all of us, somewhere in there. Oh, and I forgot to mention the mink coat.

I know about Romeo and Shazza because of the court case – I did mention this was a thoroughly modern love story – over the gifts. Shazza had them. Romeo wanted them back. He told her so in what a judge described as an “intemperate email” ending the relationship. But glass half full, Shazza. At least it wasn’t a text message or a Facebook post.

Anyway, let’s go back to the start when love was in the air.

It was February, 2011. In Egypt President Hosni Mubarak resigned in the political unrest of the Arab Spring. English Prime Minister David Cameron made his first speech about radicalisation and terrorism. In America an IBM artificial intelligence program beat two of the most successful contestants on TV show Jeopardy. In Australia Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced a carbon pricing scheme and all hell broke loose.

And somewhere in the suburbs, Romeo met Shazza .

He was 65, twice divorced and financially secure, but “a lonely, comparatively unsophisticated man looking for companionship”. She was 43, a single mother with an adult disabled daughter who “lacked the security of home ownership”.

He was immediately “besotted with her”. She “genuinely imagined herself to be in love with him”.

There might have been wars, disasters and a full-blown Tony Abbott “Julia Gillard carbon tax broken promise” imbroglio going on, but in the wild crazy love world of Romeo and Shazza it was all rainbows, twittering birds, harps, cupids, slow walks on beaches, standing in the rain and golden sunshine forever.

As Justice Geoff Lindsay put it: “The plaintiff (Romeo) and the defendant (Shazza), mature adults, each in search of something more than a single life, rode an emotional rollercoaster” towards marriage.

It was an emotional rollercoaster paved with lavish gifts and getaways because “both parties had expensive tastes and a tendency to indulge them”.

There was a $10,000 pearl necklace and Central Coast resort weekend in the first couple of weeks of wild crazy love, followed by the mink coat (In Australia? In March?).

In June there was a pearl and sapphire ring ($3500), settlement of her Mercedes car debt ($52,500), a new BMW ($87,000) and a Gold Coast holiday.

By July (five months in) things got serious and Romeo borrowed $1.3 million to buy the Sydney home where Shazza was living, and put it in her name. By that stage they were talking marriage.

But.

As I mentioned at the start, this is a thoroughly modern wild crazy love story. Romeo might have been besotted and comparatively unsophisticated, but he wasn’t without “baggage”, as latte-sipping friends and I like to say when considering weighty issues of this kind over our weekly pedicures.

There were the criminal charges. They weren’t pretty but he was eventually acquitted. Shazza stood by him.

Then there was Romeo’s stated desire to “explore the possibility of re-establishing a relationship with a former female friend”, while remaining “besotted” with Shazza. In the pedicure set we call that “wanting to have your cake and eat it too”.

For another year Romeo and Shazza enjoyed wild crazy love in far-off places like Mauritius and India, but then came Christmas/New Year 2012/13, when “everything turned sour”.

Romeo had a business failure. A man we’ll call Bruce claimed (she says, falsely) to be Shazza’s lover, and in Justice Lindsay’s immortal words: “The parties’ relationship turned to dust as quickly as it had sprung to life two years earlier.”

That’s when Romeo wanted his gifts back and Shazza said no.  

Justice Lindsay, unfortunately, does not say what Romeo and Shazza’s “song” was – the piece of music that played when they first locked eyes, or first kissed, or … did something else memorable in a couple sense.

My guess, though, would be something like Whitney Houston’s “I-e-I-e-I Will Always Love You-ou-ou-ou-ou etc etc”, because it’s the kind of song that, if it was “your song” through a wild crazy love phase, you’d look back in horror and cry: “What was I thinking?”

Either that or Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”, for obvious reasons.

Anyway, Justice Lindsay carefully considered evidence given over four days of a NSW Supreme Court hearing into the break-up of Romeo and Shazza.

Salutary lesson 1: Four DAYS of a SUPREME COURT hearing. Try to avoid that AT ALL COSTS.

He found that all witnesses endeavoured to tell the truth, “as far as it has been given to them to see truth”.

In the end Romeo got the house back but Shazza kept the Beamer, pearls, mink coat and other bling, after a relationship breakdown where no fault could be attributed to either party, Justice Lindsay said.

And so we turn to the sadly neglected American songwriting duo of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant for the song that gives us salutary lesson 2: Love Hurts.