The Different Faces Of Love

While hormones play a big part in falling in and out of love, sometimes it is serendipity or courage that moves a love affair from one level to another. Three Bee readers shared tales of love that shaped their lives.

“The interesting thing about my parents, married for 50 years,” conveyed one reader “is how they met. I believe it was fate. My parents had no idea that their fathers knew each other and came from the same little town in Italy. Both of my parent’s fathers grew up together, and then immigrated to the United States at different times for a better life. They went their separate ways. They got married, and my mother’s dad moved to Boston, while my father’s dad stayed in New York. Each of my grandfathers had their families and lost track of each other. Then after my mother graduated nursing school in Salem, Mass., she and a friend decided to venture to the big city of New York.

“My father graduated college and was working in Florida. He decided he had had enough of the tropical climate and moved back to New York at the same time my mother decided to move there.

“My maternal grandmother wrote to people she knew in New York to look after my mother; that’s the way they did it in those days. The person she wrote to was my father’s aunt. My father’s aunt wrote back and told her to tell my mother to come to an engagement party they were having and my mom could meet some people. Lo and behold, my father was there. He told me that he took one look at my mother and told himself that was who he was going to marry. And the rest is history, as they say!”

Another reader needed to make a point to her fiancé. It took a bit of courage on her part, but she resolved her dilemma. “After my boyfriend proposed to me, the discussion turned to who takes whose name. I’m not into the chattel thing — you know, the woman is owned by her father who sells her to the highest bidder — and wanted to keep my own name. My husband-to-be said that since he had gotten down on one knee with a ring, that I should take his name. Well, I though he did have at least a partial point, so I went out and had a ring made and got down on one knee and asked him to marry me.

“I now have a whole lot more respect for men, because even though he had already proposed, and I was reasonably certain that he would say yes, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

“And yes, he did say yes, and I kept my own name.”

Circumstances can work in love’s favor, and one male reader testified to that. “I remember the first Valentine’s Day with my sweetheart like it was yesterday, and not February 1979. We had been dating for about four months, and we were much in love and struggling financially, like a lot of young couples. I hadn’t been able to buy her flowers or a gift for Valentine’s Day, and was prepared to ask my boss, who happened to be my brother, for a loan until payday for the construction job I worked on.

“It was a subzero day at work and I was down in a dirt trench, cold and miserable, when my brother came by the work site. As he stood on top of the trench, he said he had something for me from our grandmother. I opened up the envelope he tossed down to me and it held a beautiful valentine from my dear grandmother.

“Then something fell out of the card and landed by my feet in the dirt. It was a hundred-dollar bill. I would have cried, if it had not been for the men around me.

“During my lunch hour, I scurried across town and bought three dozen red roses. Next I headed to the local electronics store. We needed a new alarm clock very badly. So with my new GE clock radio and three dozen roses, I headed back to work with no lunch, but a smile on my face. I made reservations for us at the best restaurant in town and left my truck running all afternoon to keep the roses from freezing.

“We married the next summer and she is still my favorite valentine. The roses lasted a short time, but the clock/radio still works and we are more in love now than we were then.”