pegs0813 Offline

57 Happily married Female from New York       2598
         

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Our Love Story

Lots of people ask me how my husband and I met and it’s a great story, but it’s a long one. So, I’ve taken the time to write it all here if you are really interested. I hope you enjoy reading it.

My husband, Jeff and I have known each other since I was 12-years-old. His sister and I have been best friends since we were children and I practically grew up at their house in a small town in Northern New Jersey.

He was 4 years older than I, so as kids, we had very little interest in each other. He was just my friend’s dopey older brother and I was the annoying girl that always hung around with his sister.

When I was 16, my father passed away very suddenly and it was a very trying time for my family and as the baby of the family, especially hard on me. I was thrown into a state of shock and didn’t know where to turn. I remember during that time, that Jeff came home from college and spent his entire spring break running errands for my family, taking my mother to the store and taking my sisters and I anywhere we needed to go.

At the time, I was too bewildered to realize it, but Jeff had come home to help take care of my family in our greatest hour of need. It would be decades until the enormity of that actually registered with me.

Jeff went back to college and when I graduated high school, I went off to college in the South and got my degree. Jeff finished his degree and went off to pursue his musical career. I honestly thought that might be the last time I would ever see him again.

After graduating from the University of Alabama, I stayed in the South and that time, I met a boy and (thought) I fell in love and we quickly got married. The marriage was a struggle from the beginning. Neither of us understood what we were getting ourselves into and we both lacked the maturity required to make a true lifetime commitment.

So after four years of toiling over the situation, we decided to part ways and got divorced. Even though I was unhappy in my marriage, getting divorced was a very difficult thing to do. I felt as if I was admitting defeat.

I hadn’t put my degree to any practical use and I thought it might be best to leave Alabama and go elsewhere to pursue my Masters degree. I was accepted into the Vanderbilt University Masters Program and moved what little I had to Nashville at the age of 30, got a part time job and started studying again.

I earned my advanced degree in a little over three years and felt pretty settled in Nashville. I liked the South and had made some good friends and had a pretty decent job working for a marketing firm. I dated a few guys here and there, but nothing ever really stuck.

I truly thought at the time, at my age, all of the good ones really were taken. Over the years, I had done my best to stay in touch with my bestie from New Jersey and we hadn’t talked as much as we had liked until one day she called me and told me that her brother Jeff had recently moved to Nashville to further his musical career and he had no idea that I had been living there. She suggested that I give him a call and reconnect with him and welcome him to town.

I had not seen Jeff in over 17 years. I gave him a call and he seemed very glad to hear a familiar voice. He explained that he had been living in various cities around the country, writing songs and playing live but that a job in music engineering and producing had brought him to Nashville and he had a great opportunity to finally make a decent living doing what he loved doing.

We agreed to meet for dinner the next evening. Even though I had lived in Nashville for quite some time, while talking to Jeff, I got the sense that he was some sort of a missing link that truly felt like home to me. I couldn’t really explain it, but his voice was calming and I could tell that he was as excited to see me as I was to see him.

When I walked into the restaurant the next evening, I saw him at the bar and recognized him immediately. He had aged ever so gracefully and appeared to have kept himself in good shape for a man who was nearly 40-years-old. His hair was as nice and thick as it ever was and the graying in his temples make him look more handsome than I ever remembered him.

He got up from his seat at the bar and hugged me as if he would never let me go. As we had dinner, we talked about everything that had gone on in our separate lives over the years. It turns out that he had also married and had also divorced, but had a young son who was living with his mother in Baltimore.

As we talked, the sound of his voice and the smile on his face brought back so many vivid memories to me. He wanted to hear everything that had gone on in my life over the years. He was as kind and caring as he was when he came to my rescue after my dad passed away and as we talked and laughed together, I found myself having feelings for him that I honestly had never had for anyone before in my life.

He drove me home, walked me to the door and looked into my face and said that, “I was a sight for sore eyes.” As I looked back at him, I could tell that he was feeling the same things I was. He kissed me goodnight and told me that he hoped that we could see each other again soon. It was a kiss that I will never forget.

I walked inside and sat down on the couch, almost dizzy. Here I was, 17 years later and nearly a thousand miles from our hometown and I had found myself falling in love with a man who I had known since I was a scrawny kid with skinned knees and braces.

He called me as soon as he got home that night and we talked for nearly another hour. I invited him over for dinner the following evening and he agreed to come if I would allow him to cook dinner together with me. I was excited to cook a meal with him and anxious for us to spend some time alone to see if this was the real deal or just some kind of flashback to a crush that I had decades earlier, but was never willing to admit.

He came over the following evening and we cooked and ate together. He brought along a guitar and sang a few songs for me that he had written. He was very cute, trying so hard to impress, when all he had to do was show up with his smile and his beautiful dark brown eyes.

That night, he told me he loved me and I told him back. It is and always will be the happiest moment of my entire life. We dated for a few months and then decided to move in together. Then, in 2005, we got married in a little wedding chapel surrounded by a handful of close friends.

We’ve been married over ten years now and since then we’ve moved back home to New Jersey. Jeff landed a terrific job in New York City and I started my own business and we have watched it grow steadily over the last three years.

If you’re still with me, I warned you that the story was long, almost as long as the wait to find my true love. If there are lessons to be learned from our story, I believe they revolve around the notion that even though you might not realize it, true love is always closer than you think.

Never give up and never say never. The only people who fail to find true love are the people who fail to realize that it is actually true love that finds them. Open your heart and be ready for it when it shows up. I always say that someone could make a movie out of a love story like ours, because honestly, at times, I feel like I’m living in a movie.

Finally, remember always, that there is no promise of tomorrow. When your movie script calls for you to lay your head down at night, knowing that tomorrow if the closing credits started rolling on your life’s movie tomorrow, you did everything you could to make sure your story had a happy ending.