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Valentine’s Week: The Love You Found or Hope to Find
Love is in the air this week. Tell us how you met your love, how he or she makes you better and what keeps your love alive. Or tell us what sort of love you are searching for. I just spent the morning singing through love songs from Broadway musicals, so I’m in the mood to hear what kind of fool you are.
When I met my husband, I wasn’t looking for love, except in the way every 17-year-old is. I spent the summer before my senior year in high school with my aunt and uncle in Washington, DC. That was eye-opening for a girl from Idaho. I loved the monuments, museums and history and — since I was a new face in a new place — enjoyed some male attention. One especially memorable instance involved a busload of soldiers passing by and breaking into waves and whistles at the sight of a pretty blonde. I was not offended. I got a lot of dates that summer and thought it was great.
While I was away, my Mom rustled up my first job at the mom & pop drug store near our house. It was an old-fashioned place with a soda fountain and a mini post office. After school started, one day at work there was a new employee, a tall, good-looking young man who — it turned out — was the bosses’ son, Steve. He was four years older than I and had just returned from a mission to Brazil, too late to go back to the university that semester. We were introduced at the soda fountain by his dad, who said that I went to the rival high school. Steve joked that he wouldn’t hold it against me.
Back then people actually dated. Boys asked girls on dates and paid, unless it was a Sadie Hawkins dance or some such thing. So we dated a little bit and then he returned to school. Back then, you could date casually, I think in part because dating was not assumed to involve sex. So we dated each other and other people for three years. Steve would get serious sometimes and suggest that we date exclusively (still no sex assumed), and I’d say that I thought that was like being engaged when you weren’t really engaged, which didn’t make sense to me, especially since we didn’t go to the same university. I didn’t want to date exclusively because, hey — fun with other guys — but I wanted to keep him in the orbit. He was kind and intelligent and wrote me poetry and sent me flowers. He made me feel special.
One day during the summer when we were both home from school, I was at my friend Pat’s house. Steve was going to pick me up there for a date. Pat’s brother was home and had just gotten engaged. A year or so before she, had set me up on a very bad blind date with this brother, and I could tell that he was not pleased to have me in the house on the happy day of his engagement. When Steve arrived and I saw him through the window I was so relieved and delighted to see him that it suddenly hit me that I might be in love and that here was someone I could always trust with my love. We didn’t get engaged for another six months or so, but that was the epiphany. Since then, we’ve always looked forward together and supported one another. My favorite manly virtue is the kind of clear-eyed intelligence that he possesses in abundance, along with being patient and slow to anger.
And he’s a great Dad. When I was a frazzled new mom with a one-month-old baby and wondering how I’d get through the next 18 years, I walked into the bedroom one day to find him sitting on the bed talking to our son, who was gooing back and then broke into his first smile. It was the moment when I started to love being a parent, and I learned it from Steve. After that though, I made sure that I always got the first smile. Now, after 39 years, we have many memories together, good and bad, but mostly good, and we have a rich set of inside jokes. I was young and stupid on that long ago day when he picked me up at Pat’s house, but I’m so grateful that I was smart enough recognize the man who would appreciate, value and return the love I gave to him.
I enjoy piecing together your personalities and stories Ricochetti, so tell us how you found love, or how you hope to find it.
Published in General
I too believe God has a plan for us but that, with our blessings of free-agency, we must make the decisions to get us on the right path and then continue making the decisions that keep us on it. In my case, it took a lot longer for me to get on that path than it took you.
Pugshot’s story about meeting the future in-laws before meeting the future wife reminds me of the experience of a person I knew some years ago that I thought was adorable. In high school this person’s high school choir was on tour. Her mother was along as a chaperone, but of course daughter refused to ride on the same bus as mother. A boy ends up sitting next to mother on the bus. The boy liked mother, figured the daughter might be worth pursuing, and so sought out daughter. Boy did find daughter and boy was right, and all was well thereafter through dating, marriage, and several children.
Another Bravo!
My husband and I met through Yahoo Personals a little over ten years ago. At that point, I had been doing internet dating for over two years and had gone on lots of dates with lots of different guys, but nothing had become serious; I was serious about it, though :) I had several different accounts with different sites, but focused mainly on Match.com, for some reason that I don’t remember. I basically just threw a picture and a profile up on Yahoo personals and forgot about it, until the day when I received a beautifully written letter from a gentleman on Yahoo personals.
For those who don’t know, it is kind of unusual for letters to be written on these dating sites- or at least it was when I was there. Usually, people just send smiles, which are the equivalent of hitting the like button, but most people don’t write whole letters. I had received a couple of letters before, but it was always clear that the men writing these letters were eccentric: one involved a guy who claimed to be a doctor, and in his letter he told me all about a medical procedure which he had supposedly just performed in which he supposedly had just saved someone’s life. In my experience, the guys who wrote letters were a little off, but my husband’s letter was different, casual and yet elegant at the same time, and it was just a really cool letter. I was impressed, so I wrote back to him.
Then he sent me a picture of himself, and my heart sank. It was a very unflattering picture, and looking at that picture, I felt no interest in him whatsoever. But I had already expressed an interest by responding to his letter, and it was such a cool letter. I decided that if he could take the time and the risk to write that letter, then I would go on at least one date with him, even though at that point I couldn’t see it going anywhere. I couldn’t stand the idea of being so cruel as to blatantly reject him on the basis of that picture: I figured that if we went out once or twice I could then dump him and it wouldn’t be so blatantly about looks. Or, who knows? Maybe he would have dumped me, but as I was driving to meet him, I expected nothing, and was thinking only of how to reject him in the nicest way possible. The minute I saw my husband in person, all thoughts of rejecting him went away: he was much better looking in person, and he had a confidence and an air about him that was very compelling.
It also became clear withing a minute or two of meeting him that he was very smart; after about five minutes of casual conversation, he had me totally pegged and he let me know it. I was never into the whole get a career thing; all I ever really wanted was to be a housewife. After hearing the short version of the story of my life, my husband just smiled and he said “You don’t ever want to work, do you?” By this time, I really liked him, so I insisted that I did want to work, but I really didn’t, and I was impressed with his bluntness on the matter. The subject was changed, but a few hours and a few drinks later, I did admit the truth, and I told him that he had been correct when he said that I didn’t want to work: I told him that all I had ever really wanted was to be a wife and mother. He smiled from ear to ear, and he said ” I would love that. I would love to be married to a woman who didn’t work.” Wow. Again, I was very impressed, and would go on to be even more impressed: he had just been divorced by a woman who had taken him for every penny. I didn’t learn about that until later, but in light of that, everything he said and everything he was just became more and more impressive.
Two weeks after we met, he told me that he was in love with me and asked me to marry him, and I said yes. From another man, it probably would have been weird, but my husband is a risk taker, and I just love watching him take risks: he is awesome. We had a long engagement, though: we didn’t actually get married for a year and a half, and we didn’t tell anybody of our plans for another year. We knew everybody would think we were crazy, and we didn’t want everybody thinking we were crazy :)
In spite of being a slow learner in romance myself, Judithann, I think it is quite possible to know right away when you’ve found the right person. Things just click. I do have friends who tell me that the recognized the right person at first sight from a distance, not on a date, usually just walking into a room or something. I am skeptical of that one. I think they must have had that thought more than once for it to have finally been true!
Agreed :)