Jordan Conroy has revealed he’s taken a big step with his girlfriend Anaelle Terrien, and said “It just felt right.”
During an interview with the Irish Independent, the Ireland Rugby 7’s player admitted they met online last year, and joked it was a “modern-day romance”.
The sports star gushed: “In the last year I met my girlfriend and saw a different life path.”
“I was single, enjoying my sports. But turning 29, 30, you start to step back from your passion.”
“I’ve kind of achieved everything I wanted to achieve. There’s something inside me that says, maybe it’s time? I have a partner now and [I] want to build [a life] with her.”
Jordan confirmed they now live together in Dublin, having moved in together after just 10 months of dating.
The rugby star said he knew on their first date that she was someone he could be himself with.
“If you had to ask 20 or 25-year-old Jordan I would have been totally against it. Too early. There was a clarity about me, where it just felt right,” he explained.
Over the weekend, Jordan won praise for opening up about being a child of domestic abuse on The Late Late Show.
The Ireland Rugby 7’s star spoke to host Patrick Kielty about his difficult childhood growing up in Germany, which he described as “very dark” and “traumatic”.
Jordan moved to Tullamore in Co. Offaly with his mother and sister when he was 10, after escaping his violent stepfather.
Opening up further to the Irish Independent about the abuse he and his family suffered at the hands of his stepdad, Jordan said: “Obviously, I was very protective of my mother. I wasn’t the biggest fan of him.”
“The first couple of years were grand, I suppose. I don’t know when that dark phase happened. I just remember that he got very abusive towards my mum.”
“She was a very strong character who didn’t take any BS. She’s her own woman, and I don’t know if he liked that, that she stood up to him. But, it got very physical over quite a number of years. I don’t remember how many years. I just remember instances of having to walk in and seeing him beating her.”
“It was many a sleepless night when it happened. He’d come in drunk and they’d argue. Well, I mean, he would argue, and it always came to blows. I always had to run away and get help. My sister had to watch that. It just became a recurring thing. I’d just run.”
He continued: “He beat me when I tried to help her. As a child, it’s not good to see that, is it? I suppose I was very lucky in the end not to fall into that vicious cycle, but it did affect me as a kid, because I got very violent in school.”
Jordan then spoke about when he was around nine or 10, there was “one night she had enough.”
He revealed: “I remember I heard them arguing, and I got out of bed, and she just gave me, like, the eye contact, to say, get ready to run. She just went, like, ‘Jordan, go’.”
He admitted: “It’s the most detailed one I can remember. It’s just her screaming, getting beaten up by him. And I just run up the stairs, crying, going ‘please call the police’.”
“I remember coming down and her white T-shirt full of blood and everything. And he denied it. ‘No, she hit me first.’ At that time, it was enough. I was doing bad in school. She was getting heavily beaten. My sister was getting affected, too. She had to for divorce, but he wouldn’t let her go.”
