I was eighteen when I first met the boy who would eventually become my husband. Jeff was funny, handsome and smart and for me, it was love at first sight. At the time he had a girlfriend and didn’t realize that I had a crush on him, which is hard for me to believe since I thought it must have been very obvious. We were part of a close-knit group of friends and every single one of them knew that I liked Jeff, except for him. Over the course of three years we grew to be close friends, but he was still dating the same girl and I had several boyfriends come and go. In college it seemed that the expectation for dating was that after a few dates a girl would let a guy do anything he wanted, but I am NOT that girl!

I had a mental rule that if a boy tried to touch me anywhere that might ordinarily be covered by a swimsuit then he wasn’t the right guy for me! That’s not to say that I didn’t hold hands and kiss and do all of those things, but if anyone tried to take it further than that I wasn’t interested. During all of the time that Jeff had a girlfriend, I went to increasingly embarrassing measures to be near him. The most embarrassing moment of my college career revolves around sneaking into his room when I thought he wasn’t home to take a deep breath because I loved the way he smelled, and getting caught! I thought he had gone to his parent’s house for the weekend, but he hadn’t.

Eventually he and his girlfriend broke up with no intervention from me, and I happened to be single as well when I found out a few months down the road. It was only a short while later that we went on our first date, and ten months after that we were engaged. The next fall we were married and we now have one son. It took a lot of patience, but it was all worth the wait in the end!