Dating : Finding Mr. Right

Not all of us go about it in the conventional way…

I’ve often done things in an unconventional way, and that day was no exception. I was halfway through a missionary term in Texas, and stood waiting at the gate at Hobby airport in Houston. My palms sweated as I nervously watched the stewardess open the door for arriving passengers.

“You look excited,” said a short elderly lady standing next to me. “Someone special arriving?”

I nodded. “I’m pretty sure it’s the man I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.”

She clasped her hands to her heart. “How wonderful!”

I smiled in agreement. “I just hope I recognize him — we’ve never met.”

Meeting the man of your dreams after falling in love is not the normal way of courtship, but after months of correspondence through a pen pal organization, he finally walked through the door, and the dimpled smile I’d only seen in photos greeted me at long last.

We spent the next five days talking about everything but the “M” word; he had promised not to do something as stupid as proposing on the first visit. That came several months later during a Christmas visit to meet my family in Massachusetts. He took me to my childhood “thinking spot”, a bird sanctuary close to home, because he knew it was a big decision. We stood on the observation tower in minus ten degree weather, and I only took my mitten off long enough to accept the ring his grandmother had first accepted back in 1927.

When I headed back to Texas for the final months as a missionary, wedding plans began via long distance — without the convenience of today’s Internet or cell phones. As I finally left Texas to drive to NJ to spend a few days with his family, I fought back the nerves for my solo drive in a rental van on strange highways. I prayed for safety with clenched hands on the steering wheel the whole first day on the road. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at the first hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas to find an excited desk clerk handing me mail. “We’ve been waiting for you! Who the heck gets mail when they check in to a motel?” I planned future stops in Tennessee, Virginia, and Central Pennsylvania, and looked forward to getting off the road each day to find another card waiting from my romantic pen pal.

Months later, on our honeymoon tour of New England, we dined in a quaint New Hampshire restaurant. We talked about some of the friends and family who thought we’d been crazy every step of the way.

My husband smiled from across the table. “Do you realize today marks eight days together — the longest amount of time we’ve spent with each other since we first met?”

I laughed at the absurdity of the question. “I guess it’s a good thing we still like each other.”

Thirty plus years later, we still do.