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given this great, handsome and intelligent guy with the responsibility to love. Hey, love is a verb. I've said that all my life. We choose whom we want to love and I most certainly love my darling husband. I love him to death. I might even say that I often am in' love with him. But I was having a problem. I wondered. I wondered whether under different circumstances this was the guy that I would have fallen for.

Now I know that Hollywood's version of romance isn't all that accurate. After the main characters have finally beaten all odds and fallen in love, in real life real life would hit them. I know that what most teenagers assume to be their true soulmates' ultimately are just a passing boat in sea of bigger and better ships. Yes, I know that many that fall in love' and then get married find that the bliss they were certain was theirs permanently, has gone from whence it came. And yet the questions remained.

Part of a poem I once wrote:
Yet these doubts can't be dismissed
'What if true soulmates exist?'
This nagging thought just will persist
To bug and irk and still insist:
If it weren't mine, why is it missed?'

And the realization was benign. Not huge at all. Yet it rocked my world at its core. If true soulmates do exist if there is a man out there who the cosmos have aligned as my perfect mate the man that can challenge me, and understand me, and accept me, and more than anything make me get to know myself better and grow as a person If there is a man out there whom I was meant to love, and who's love I can count on to last a lifetime in good times and bad, in sickness and in health - - if God in His infinite wisdom did indeed assign someone like that for me, then the obviousness is blinding. My destiny. The man whom I was to fall in love with. The man whom I married.

Obviously we skipped the dating' part. I skipped being courted, he skipped having that selection. I skipped the flirting, he skipped the seducing. We skipped the conversations where we would have realized that this was indeed the person we wanted as our life's partners. We skipped the talk where we discussed our dreams for our futures and then checked to see how they relate to each others. We skipped the part where he asked me to be his wife.

But we still can have our picnics, our moonlit walks along the flowing country river, and dancing to flickering candlelight. We can still have our many creative dates', the parking', the stroll alongside the Manhattan skyline, and the stargazing. And we can have all that for the low low price of no heartache or drama. Some would consider that a good thing.

So while we can't have the before' we were certainly given the ultimate gift of the happily ever after'. Always and forever. With all my love.

Learn more about this author, Shirley Hess.
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