An Unlikely Fairytale

By releasing my expectations of how my perfect romance would start, I ended up finding love in a way I never would have imagined.

As I was growing up, I decided the cutest and most romantic love stories are the ones in which the members of a couple were friends prior to dating. I longed for the friend-turned-boyfriend scenario, so that me and my future partner would have an adorable “how we met” story to tell for years to come — one in which we took turns telling portions of our evolution from friends to something more. We would use practiced lines including a few little jokes about how other members of the group wondered if something was happening between us behind the scenes, much to the delight of people at dinner parties.

My desire for a perfectly told “how we met” story was born from the one I can tell by heart — that of my parents. My Mom was working at Western Electric in Princeton, New Jersey, when she heard through the office grapevine that a good-looking, athletic, blue-eyed engineer had recently been hired. This was the 70’s so there was no Linkedin, Facebook or Google with which to do stealthy research before meeting someone for the first time. The company did hang up photos of newly-hired employees in a certain hallway, so Mom checked him out there. On a Friday afternoon in his 2nd…