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    Boy Meets Girl: 40 Couples on How and Where They Met the One
    Boy Meets Girl: 40 Couples on How and Where They Met the One
    Boy Meets Girl: 40 Couples on How and Where They Met the One
    Ebook198 pages2 hours

    Boy Meets Girl: 40 Couples on How and Where They Met the One

    By Rachel Safier

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    About this ebook

    Everyone hopes to find their one true love. For the forty couples in this one-of-a-kind collection, that dream came true. Whether it was a twist of fate or soulmates reunited, these heartwarming stories will make any cynic believe in love again. Story categories include: Cupid Hit Me Upside the Head; We Were Only Kids!; I Couldn’t Stand Him When We Met; Friends First; Love at First Sight; Finding Love Online, or YouandMe.com; Embarrassing Meets; Relationship Redux; Office Romance; Everyone Knew Except Us!; The Blind Date. Whether you are still searching for your match or celebrating a golden anniversary, everyone will fall in love with this collection of romantic encounters.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateNov 17, 2008
    ISBN9781440515101
    Boy Meets Girl: 40 Couples on How and Where They Met the One

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      Book preview

      Boy Meets Girl - Rachel Safier

      boy meets girl

      40 Couples on How and Where They Met the One

      Rachel Safier

      author of There Goes the Bride and Mr. Right Now

      9781598695564_0004_001

      Copyright © 2009 by Rachel Safier

      All rights reserved.

      This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any

      form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are

      made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

      Published by

      Adams Media, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

      57 Littlefield Street, Avon, MA 02322. U.S.A.

      www.adamsmedia.com

      ISBN 10:1-59869-556-8

      ISBN 13: 978-1-59869-556-4

      eISBN: 978-1-44051-510-1

      Printed in the United States of America.

      J I H G F E D C B A

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      is available from the publisher.

      This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional advice. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.

      —From a Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations

      This book is available at quantity discounts for bulk purchases.

      For information, please call 1-800-289-0963.

      contents

      preface

      chapter 1. finding love online

      how jason met amy

      how wendy met paul

      how nancy met dale

      how beth met pat

      how kevin met julie

      chapter 2. we were only kids

      how susie met andrew

      how bev met gordie

      how priscilla met scott

      how sue met ron

      chapter 3. we were meant to be

      how rose met mike

      how dixie met bobby

      how jen met matt

      how deborah met john

      chapter 4. love at first sight

      how rachel met rafael

      how james met sarah

      how kate met leonard

      chapter 5. not exactly love at first sight

      how amanda met michael

      how robert met maryann

      how lauren met andrew

      how lew met catherine

      chapter 6. relationship redux

      how beth met bob

      how claudia met mark

      how denise met rich

      how bob & anna met

      chapter 7. office meets

      how doug met carolyn

      how rebecca met dave

      how belle met tony

      how julie met jeff

      chapter 8. friends first

      how rebecca met greg

      how susan met ned

      how lindsey met john

      chapter 9. the blind date

      how kayla met keith

      how sarah met ted

      how amy met dale

      how amy met mike

      how kimberly met thomas

      chapter 10. going out when you want to stay in

      how john met serena

      how jill met jim

      how john & daisy met

      Boy Meets Girl has been a joy thanks to Jennifer Kushnier, Andrea Norville, and the team at Adams Media; my longtime agent Stacey Glick at Dystel & Goderich; and, especially, the women and men who let me into their lives. Thank you:

      When I count my blessings, I count you twice.

      —Irish blessing

      preface

      I n the middle of the table sat a fancy cut-crystal punchbowl, and Allen leaned forward to help himself. The punch was delicious—red, cold, and so sweet Allen had no idea it was spiked. So he kept ladling. By the time he tore himself away to flirt with Joan—leaning casually against a wall, she was dark-eyed and beautiful—he was absolutely drunk. And funny—very, very funny. Joan was on her way out of the party, but she asked if Allen wanted to meet up with her and some friends at a nearby diner later on. He said yes and took off as soon as she was out of sight.

      He made his way over to his brother’s apartment nearby and banged on the door. When his brother answered, Allen told him he was drunk and desperately needed some coffee and a shower. Semi-sobered up, he met Joan and her friends at the diner, where he charmed her some more. When the gathering broke up, he escorted Joan home to Lower Manhattan, then hopped a bus to get himself back to Brooklyn. But he passed out in the bus and woke up in the bus yard.

      They were married a year later and lived together, very much in love, for thirty-eight years. The story of my parents’ meeting has been making me smile my whole life. My late father used to act the tale out while he told it: Eyes wide, he’d mime pouring cup after cup of punch. Getting drunk and listing around the room, then banging on my uncle’s door. I was twenty or twenty-one before he ever shared the ending of the tale of that fateful first meeting. And even then, he said he fell asleep on the bus. Sure, Dad.

      As the years went on and I kept asking to hear the story again, my father—still funny, very, very funny—started to make up new stories. My mother used to follow him, he’d tell us (listening to the tall tale, she protested, Allen! only pretending to be aggrieved), and he couldn’t shake her. He’d get into the elevator in the morning, and there she’d be. Just traveling up and down, hoping for a glimpse of him. Or he’d tell us that he was much younger than she (also not true). And while he played stickball in the schoolyard, she’d lean against the fence and call out to him: Come here, little boy! He actually thought I’d believe she ever said that.

      My father’s parents met at a party too (though I don’t know what mock meetings my grandfather might very well have concocted over the years). She was eighteen and he was twenty-two, and when he took her out on the dance floor, she stepped all over his feet.

      You must be a great cook, he told her. Flattered, she asked why. He retorted, Because you can’t dance. In a yellowed newspaper clipping I uncovered as a twelve-year-old, I read my grandmother’s account of falling in love with this wise guy. The newspaper named it the winner in their How I Met My Husband contest.

      Ah, love. My mom wore all black on her twenty-fifth birthday because she knew she was over the hill. There was a point there when I too turned my back on love, romance, and my One. Going through a broken engagement can do that to you.

      But when I again started to seek out the how we met stories that I’ve always loved, I knew I was healing. And when I listened to them—these amazing, amusing, shocking stories of how two total strangers met and clicked—anything began to seem possible again. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote that it often feels like we’re all just ships that pass in the night. But sometimes we’re actually meeting our better halves bobbing out there in the dark sea.

      Sure, I could sit at home and close my heart. But I saw that there were literally millions of diverse, amazing stories out there of boys meeting girls. Some people swear it was love at first sight—like actor Andy Garcia, who told In Style magazine in 1999 that he met his wife in a bar in Florida. And I’m proud to say I proposed to her the first night I met her. Probably about the third thing I said was ‘Will you marry me?’ I was so overwhelmed by her. That was it—I didn’t need to look any further.

      Then come those lovers who at first meeting couldn’t have disliked each other more. Troubled and soulful Kiwi singer Beth Hart told NZGirl, an online magazine based in New Zealand, I met Scotty at the beginning of my . . . tour, but we in no way were intimate . . . we didn’t even like each other. We just did not get along. It was only after he helped her through rehab that they ran off to Vegas. Triumphantly, she exclaimed, I haven’t been in trouble since!

      Some happily married couples met as kids. Bev and Gordie got engaged in the first grade, while other lovers like Denise and Rich, who broke up and made up several times (with Denise getting engaged to someone else at one point) before they got married—took awhile to get it right.

      There are those who left their meetings to fate. That might mean turning to a computer for a match—like Nancy, who had all the criteria of what I wanted, down to the astrological sign, and when she plugged it in, up came Dale. Or it could apply to Robert, who went cruising in his car hoping to find someone wonderful and met Maryann.

      From the ocean to online, somehow, boys are meeting girls, souls are lighting up, and another two have found their One. When you stop to think about it, it’s a miracle every time.

      boy meets girl

      chapter 1

      finding love

      online

      Back in sixteenth-century England, Helen Morrison placed the first-known lonely-hearts ad in her local Manchester paper. The spinster was looking for love but instead found herself committed to a lunatic asylum for a month by the city’s mayor. If the same rules applied today, asylums would be a good place to go looking for a spouse. According to a 2005 study reported by ABC News, 17 million U.S. adults have posted online personal ads, and 21 million have browsed them.

      I first heard about online dating back in 2000. I was sharing an airport shuttle in San Francisco with a couple who had flown west to attend their daughter’s wedding—and to meet her fiancé for the first time. Making small talk, I asked the parents how the bride and groom had found each other. Clearly shocked themselves, they admitted that she had met the man online. I remember looking at the poor couple and thinking, My God, their daughter is marrying a total stranger. Her parents didn’t look too pleased, either. If the mother’s thoughts were visible in a cartoon bubble above her head, I’m pretty sure it would have read, Yes, he very well may be an axe murderer.

      But in the years since, Internet dating has not only lost its stigma, it’s also proven itself to be a smart way to find a mate. Maybe that’s because with a personal ad, we’re laying all our cards out on the table right away. Look, your date-to-be is saying, I’m in the market for a wife. I’m a Virgo, carnivore, have two cats (allergic to dogs) and I never go to bed before midnight. Getting all that information up front may seem less than romantic, but as the couples in this chapter prove, romance is alive and well on the Internet.

      how jason

      met amy

      Met online: September 2003

      Met in person: October 2003 in Chantilly, Virginia (at the Washington-Dulles Airport). Jason was thirty-two, Amy was thirty.

      Married: May 2005

      I moved to Washington, D.C., in 2000, and I had enormous trouble dating. Nothing was really clicking. By 2003, I was getting totally depressed, so my uncle convinced me to sign up for Internet dating. I had just started a new job and was working really hard, and soon I was going to start a lot of traveling. But my uncle had read about a new website called eHarmony and he said, We’ll do it together. He sat down and walked me through it. It has a long personality test—you can’t just search through profiles right off the bat. We filled it out for me.

      At first, the site sent me no matches at all. Then it sent me a few people. And just before I left for a business trip, it sent me Amy. There are five stages to the eHarmony process. First you can ask each other multiple-choice questions, then short-answer questions. It takes you through the deal breakers. After a few weeks, just when Amy and I had gotten to the stage where we could e-mail each other, my company told me on three days notice that I had to go to Uzbekistan for a month. I e-mailed her and said, Your profile looks fantastic but I’m leaving for Uzbekistan and don’t know whether I’ll have email there. Can I e-mail you when I get back? I didn’t hear back from her.

      I got on a plane and thirty hours later arrived in Tashkent. Sure enough, there was e-mail. When I got to the hotel and checked in, I found she had e-mailed me back: Absolutely, but I lived on the Uzbekistan border for two years with the Peace Corps and I can tell you what to go see. She e-mailed me every day for a week, guiding me around. I took her advice and wrote her back often. It was the nicest way to start.

      As the weeks progressed, our e-mails got longer and longer. They were less and less about work and the trip. By the end, they were three pages long and totally romantic. One of her best friends worked for my company. I had one of my friends send her friend a reference so she could tell Amy I was a normal guy.

      While we were writing, I thought,

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