Real love versus the stuff we make up…
For a while now, I thought I would do a blog post on real love, you know the kind we find out there as we go along in our lives, versus the stuff we writers make up in the stories that float around in our heads.
I can’t help it. I’m a romantic. One of the first things I always ask someone when I’m first meeting them is how they met their significant other. I really love those stories. For the sake of disclosure, I’ll tell you how I met mine: at Tulane Law School. Not very romantic when I put it like that right? But how about if I elaborate a little bit? I had moved from my northern existence to the great state of Louisiana, specifically to the Big Easy, to go to Law School. This was a big move for me. I was (gasp) twenty-two years old, straight out of my undergraduate existence (which was at a wonderful, but small college) of about 2000 people.
So the move to New Orleans was deliberately on my part a really big deal. I knew if I didn’t go, I would live within two hours of where I was born for my entire life and the last thing I wanted to do while I was in law school was to live (gasp again) with my parents.
My husband is New Orleans born and bred, with a brief jaunt over to Texas to go to college. He loves (as do I) New Orleans and would have been happy (as would I) to have lived his whole life on the shores of the Mississippi River. Anyhow, my second or third weekend in town, I went with a group of law students over the Biloxi, Mississippi to go gambling. It was three women and three men and we had two hotel rooms. By the end of the evening everyone had coupled off except me because I was not interested in coupling with the man who was interested in coupling with me. We drove home in my little Subaru with New Jersey license plates in the middle of the night. For the record, one of those couples that formed that weekend are now married and living in Florida so I, as a lover of romance, am not upset by the turn of events that weekend.
Especially, because as I decided I better find new friends, I would later that week hone in on my future husband’s (if he had been in Biloxi, Mississippi with us I would have felt differently about the whole trip. Needless to say, I had a crush on him from the moment I saw him in Contracts class) plans to visit an art gallery with his group of friends who did not go to law school with us. To make a long story short, I was late to meet them, he was leaving when I got there, and anyone who knows me knows I am almost never late. There is a lot more to this story. How could there not be? I dropped out of law school nearly a year later but didn’t leave New Orleans because I wanted to be him. We were married two years later and we have three children now and we’re back living less than two hours from where I grew up.
So knowing how all of my friends met their significant others, I decided to question all the writers I know on how they met theirs. See, this is fascinating to me, because we as Romance writers, spend a ton of time obsessing over the ‘meet.’ How the couple that will be our hero and heroine is hugely important. Not surprising, everyone has a great story. (My CP wrote letters with her husband, isn’t that romantic? Sigh. Husband are you reading this? Love letters…LOL. I joke. We have a twelve-week-old baby at home. No one is sleeping, let alone writing letters.)
Anyhow, what I found was that everyone has these great romantic stories that are so fantastic that if I put them in books the editors would tell me they weren’t believable AND I write paranormal so that’s saying something.
So I called this Blog today In Praise of Real Live Love because, even as I had assumed that real life love stories I would hear would be less interesting than the ones I read and write about, I found it to be just the opposite case. Fiction has nothing on Real Life in the Love Department.
How did you meet you significant other? Want to tell me? Is your love timeless?
Comment today. One lucky commentator will win a copy of Love Beyond Time, available now from Eirelander Publishing.
RR
