Our Love Story- Part 1: The Prequel… Where Singles Click

It was the end of the summer 2005; I had just bought my first house with plans of renting out the top level and living in a basement apartment. I was having the kitchen in the basement renovated, so I was staying with my Dad (who was relatively newly widowed) and my baby brother (who is 6 foot 2 not really a baby- but is three years my junior, therefore he will always be my baby brother).

It was the first time I had lived at home since leaving for University 4 years prior. Moving home was something I swore I would never do; though I loved my mother dearly, our relationship was less than harmonious which made it difficult to cohabitate.

Living in the house where my mother lived and died was hard at times, it felt like living there without her only underlined the fact that she was gone. I avoided what was my parent’s bedroom like the plague. I hated going in there, because if I stood still long enough, sometimes I could still smell my mother’s perfume, hear her voice or see her lifeless body laying in their king sized bed.

However, moving in with the men in my life was uniquely comforting and easy, like putting on an old worn in pair of jeans only to realize they fit better than ever before, I got to enjoy living with my Dad and Brother as an adult.

We stayed up late talking, drinking wine and watching movies, I got go out on father/daughter dates all the time, and I got to be the one woken up at 2AM to a tap on my bedroom window because my drunk brother had forget his key to the front door. This is something he used to do for me when I turned 19 and now I got to return the favour. For one brief moment in time, I got to be the woman on earth that they loved the most, it was pretty cool.

Then Dad made the big announcement that the time had come for him to start dating. He setup a profile and posted some pictures on Lavalife.com, his inbox was flooded and women literally started flocking from miles around.

Suddenly our roles had reverse, he was the one out every Friday and Saturday night wining and dining and I was the one sitting at home waiting up for him, so I could hear how his date went. Dad was alive, happy, excited and lusted after, it was fun to watch and bare witness to. He suggested that I follow suit and start dating online, have some fun, live a little and stop living like a shut-in on weekends and start living like the twenty-something single that I was.

So with his encouragement and a little help from Dr. Phil and John Gray, I posted a profile and started dating. I was going to be picky, selective and observant. I wasn’t looking for Mr. Right-Now I was looking for Mr. Forever. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right and with the ultimate goal of marriage in mind.

I went on all kinds of dates, with all kinds of men. It was fun, but somehow disappointing at the same time. It was a lot of lead up, I would get an email or a message from a guy, we’d email back and forth, talk on the phone and exchange pictures. Each time I would hope that it was going to be something special, only to go on a first date to discover that it was also meant to be a last date.

That is until I started conversing with the one man that I hoped wasn’t something special, the one man that I put off and avoided until a first date was completely unavoidable.

To be continued…

Here’s the introduction to this series:  A New Series on Confessions of a Loving Wife: Our Love Story

Tagged as: dating, Dr Phil, John Gray, love