Our Love Story
Chapter 1: The Day We Met
Chapter 2: The First Date
Chapter 3: I Told him"I Love You"
Chapter 4: He Told Me "I Love You Too"
Chapter 5: The Proposal
Chapter 6: The REAL Love Story
I could tell you how we met, how we dated, and about how he proposed. I could tell you why he's cute, why he's funny, and why I totally and completely adore him. Of course this is all VERY important to me, but any person of our age has seen, heard, and experienced it all before. Boy meets girl, boy likes girl, girl likes boy, they fall in love, and live happily ever after. If you have heard one story, you have heard them all. Every girl is a princess with their fairy tale prince and story book ending...but what happens in between it all? What makes the boy like the girl and the girl like the boy? What happens when the cameras shut off and the audience goes home? I believe what constitutes the magnificence of a love story are the emotions and thoughtfulness that go on in between the "chapter headliners".
To briefly introduce us, we both graduated from Florida State University last Spring and moved to Atlanta to start our careers. We both work long hours, don't get to see each other enough, and our time together is often spent catching up on lost sleep. It has been hard for both of us. We have few friends close by for support so we have only had each other to lean on. Sometimes we fight, but because we are both so stubborn and yet so passionate the fight usually ends with fighting over who loves the other more.
The moments that touch my heart the most in our year and half together are not necessarily the grandiose proposal or the obvious steps he took to assure his love for me in front of others. What touches my heart the most is his passionate love for me when it is just the two of us, when no one else is watching. These moments and often wordless expressions are what will always stand out the most when I think of how to define our love. Recently, I came down with the worst food poisoning of my life. Brandon was at work and I was home all alone. In my head, my hypochondriac of a self was dying from the worst case of Salmonella known to man-kind. I thought I was going to die all alone in my apartment because my poor, hard-working fiance wouldn't be able to come home from work to comfort me in my suffering. Of course he was on the cell phone, frantic with worry because I was turning a probably mild case of food poisoning into a terminal disease. In less than an hour, he somehow found someone to cover his shift and was soon home by my side. I will always remember how he looked when he came home. The expression on his face was completely impromtu and totally unpremeditated. A person could have read his heart on his face.
When he burst through the front door, the worried look on his face said "I love you" more than any romantic action he has ever or will ever attempt to take. I can't explain it nor can I even expect another person to understand, but when I think about how great our love is, his expression at that moment reflects it all. That priceless face said "You are safe because I'm here". It said "If anything ever happened to you, I couldn't survive". That face said "I'll love you forever". That's how I know he will love and protect me no matter what. Not just because we will say our "I Dos" or our "through thick and through thins", but because he has already proven that he will go to the end of the earth (in my mind) for me. Here in lies the depth of our love story. That face...it is my love story. It is my happily ever after.
