Every Romance Needs a Cute Meet

Every romance writer knows that there are certain elements needed to create a story. They must establish time, place, and setting, plus create a cute meet for the hero and heroine.

The first meeting is an event that will irrevocably change their lives. How often have you been asked,  "How did you two meet?"

How I met my husband

In a movie while the credits are rolling the time and place would be established. It's the 1960's, the decade of Woodstock, Kent State, and peace and love.

My heroine is at a peace rally or Woodstock.

The hero is in Germany, knee deep in snow while on practice maneuvers with the US Army.

Cute Meet

The story starts on Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, NY.

She's wearing cut off shorts, has long hair she ironed that morning, and there's a closed physics text book on her beach blanket.

He has shoulder length hair, wide sideburns, and a commitment problem.

They talk for hours and he takes her phone #.

His Point of View - One week later

He's resting on a beach blanket. She walks by, kicks sand on the blanket, and keeps walking. He pretends to ignore her.

His friend comments,  "Isn't that the girl you met last week?"

"It is."

"You going to talk to her?"

"I guess I will." The sand is hot and he jogs over to her blanket. He asks permission to step on her blanket.

She says, "No." 

Maybe she's pissed that I didn't call. In spite of the hot sand he stays there and starts a conversation.

She relents and invites him to sit down.

He likes to talk and she's a good listener. The sun starts to set. His friend leaves our hero his car key so he can drive her home. 

Happily Ever After

She's easy to talk to and he tells her about the places he's visited. She dreams of traveling and knows this is the guy she wants to do it with.

How I Met My Husband: Going That Extra Mile

by Jean C. Gordon

My husband and I met in a Western Civilization class the second semester of our freshman year at Genesee Community College.No bells or whistles or fireworks. But I can still picture our meet as if it were a few days ago, rather than 43 years ago. He and Laurie, a girl I worked on the student newspaper with, and I all sat in the middle back of the classroom that first day. We talked for a while after class and went our separate ways.

I, the quintessential good girl, honor student was drawn to his bad-boy look — long hair, beard, well-worn jeans and jeans jacket, not to mention he drove a Triumph 650 motorcycle. He was drawn to — well, I'll get to that later.

We met again a couple of days later when he turned up in my painting class, too. He was studying art. I needed an art class and thought a hands-on one would be more fun than Art History. Because the supplies we needed for class were so expensive, the art teacher suggested we students go in together on them. Mark struck up a conversation with me after class and asked where I lived. I told him, and he said we should share art supplies. He could pick them up that day after his classes and bring them over to my house since I lived "right on his way home."

It turned out his idea of "right on the way" was a little different than other people's. I lived with my parents 30 minutes south of the college, and he lived 20 minutes west of school. And I'm talking windy two-lane country roads. 

Who could resist a guy who was willing to go out of his way like that right right from the start?

As for what attracted him to me, he told me after we'd been going out a while that the first day we'd met, he'd decided he would ask either Laurie or me out. Why did he choose me? My scintillating conversation? My winning smile? No. Remember, he's a guy. He liked the way I looked walking out of the classroom better.

Ah! Weddings.

By

Sandra Wilkins

            The bride is blushing underneath her long filmy veil.  A bouquet of fragrant roses and baby’s breath tremors in her hands as she takes her father’s arm, and tentatively steps down the aisle to the romantic melody of Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus”.  Lovingly, she gazes at the confident, handsome groom as he awaits her arrival to be at her side forever…

            Ah!   Weddings.  They evoke thoughts of beauty for some and maybe angst for others—depending on your point of view.  Some young women go to extremes to have the “perfect” day.  Even to the extent of becoming a “bridezilla” and spending a fortune on that “hallowed” occasion.  Being the extremely practical person I am, I didn’t particularly want all that fuss and fluff when I got married twenty-something years ago.  In the age of big hair and shoulder pads I was going to be a rebel.    

            Simplicity was the key for me.  It began with the gown.  No fancy, frilly concoctions for me.  I wanted a restrained Edwardian style frock.  My mom helped me find a pattern and the creamy off-white material and then my great aunt Dorothy graciously made the dress for me.  I’ll treasure it always. 

            Next were the flowers.  Not one for expensive things, I opted for silk flowers and made the bouquet and boutonnieres myself.  The bouquet is still as pretty today.  My dad’s cousin played the wedding march, my aunt took the photographs, a neighbor made the elegant three-tiered wedding cake (with the topper from my parent’s cake) and my mom made the chocolate grooms cake. 

            It was a personal ceremony in our small church.  All of my grandparents and one great grandmother were still alive to witness the occasion.  The most special part for me was visiting with the friends and family who attended the modest reception.  Simplicity isn’t for everyone, so I’m curious—what kind of wedding did you have? 

     Sandra Wilkins is busy writing another series while home educating her two daughters.  Ada’s Heart, Rose’s Hope and Gwen’s Honor are her first three published wholesome historical romances.  Go to www.sandrawilkins.com to find out more about her and her books. 

  

Let's talk about Love

by Jayne Ormerod

   It’s a rite of passage, when a young girl bids adieu to group-movie nights and dances held in the high school gym and moves on “grown up” dates…like a military ball.

     It happened to me in 1979.  I’d met a guy at a frat party (also a rite of passage but not quite in the “grown up” date category!) and he invited me to the Navy Birthday ball to be held at a local resort and conference center.  Fancy-schmancy! He showed up on my doorstep wearing his formal U. S. Navy Dress Blue Uniform with “grown up” written all over him.  I sported a light blue chiffon, full-length gown. It was truly a Cinderella Moment for me…until we climbed into his rusty, pea-green Pinto hatchback.  But that’s another story for another day.

     This was 1979 and we were 18 which meant old enough to legally consume 3.2% beer (do the math: drink twice as much to get the same effect full octane beer.) The evening involved lots of men in dress blue uniforms, some sporting lots of medals on their chest (the commanding officer…) and lots of women in sparkling dresses.  We drank our beer and discussed (not talked mind you, but in a very grown-up way discussed) politics and literature and world events.  I pinched myself a few times to make sure I wasn’t dreaming

     I soon remembered the problem with drinking twice as much beer is that you have to visit the ladies’ room twice as often. Before we sat down to dinner (and grown-up speeches that would change the world!) I made one quick visit and returned to the ballroom in time to be seated at one of the many small round tables covered with white linen cloths. There was more stemware and silverware than I knew what to do it.       
     The “head table” with the high-ranking officers and their companions were seated on long dais at the front of the room, overlooking the dance floor which had been pressed into service as the buffet l line.

     They called us by table to take our turn at the buffett, so those of us not in line watched from our seats as other guests piled their plates high with roast beef, baked chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans (I don’t think they’d invented salad in 1979) and other high-carb foods that were the staple of our diet.  While it bore striking similarity to dining hall food, it tasted so much better when seated under dim chandelier lights  and with a linen (not paper) napkin in my lap.

     Eventually our turn came to go belly up to the buffet. It felt like every eye in the house watched me as I filled my plate. About half-way along, a server came up behind me and whispered in my ear…”Honey, you might want to pull your dress down…it’s all tucked up in your underwear.” 
     Yes, there is more to being "grown up" than dressing the part. 

     The good news is the young midshipman married me anyway.  Now that’s love! 

How I Met My Husband: Destiny and Fire Safety

by Victoria M. Johnson

It was the eighties: Ronald Reagan was president, Michael Jackson's album Thriller topped the charts, and big hair and leg warmers were fashion hits.  I was in the Air Force and fresh out of tech school as an aerovac medic (air medical evacuation).  On my first assignment at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California, I found out everyone at the hospital had to participate in an emergency fire safety exercise.  My supervisor signed me up.  I had no choice in the date selection.  I went and that's where I first met him.

You know how they say when you meet 'the one' that you hear bells ringing?  I swear when our eyes locked I heard those bells.  I also felt out of breath and giddy.  I should point out that I'm not the giddy type.  I graduated from basic training as an honor grad and a marksman.  At that time I held a red belt in Tae Kwon Do.  So, there we were in this overcrowded outdoor staging area with perhaps a hundred people: doctors, nurses, sergeants, airmen, officers, MPs--and for me it was as if the world stopped spinning and only the two of us stood there. 

He smiled at me and I smiled back.  He had captivating green eyes and dark blondish hair.  He looked athletic and decisive.  I noticed three stripes on his shoulders--I had only one on mine.  A good thing about the military, we all wore nametags.  His said, Johnson.  He boldly joined the circle of friends I sat with and introduced himself.  I admired his confidence.  We talked for a few minutes and in that short time I discovered he had a great sense of humor.  But we didn't get much time, both whisked away into different groups.  He was assigned the rescuer group and I went into the patient group. 

An hour and a half later I wondered if I would ever see him again.  The people in my group were given safety briefings then we were divided up and thrust into separate hospital rooms.  All I knew about him was his name, Senior Airmen Johnson.  For all I knew his group had been dismissed and he was back on his ward working.  I didn't know which ward.  And there I was with five other people sitting and standing around a two-bed patient room, waiting.

Then, we all heard the fire alarms sound off.  The adrenaline pumped through me.  For a moment I forgot it was an exercise.  But someone reminded me and others to stay put.  Suddenly the door burst open, and I mean burst, like a saloon door in the Old West.  There stood Senior Airmen Johnson.  He spotted me and walked straight for me.  Without a beat he threw me over his shoulder in the firemen's carry we had just learned, and waltzed out of the "burning" hospital building with me wriggling saying, "You can put me down now."

Let me digress a moment here, in the romance-writing world there is a thing called the twelve stages of intimacy, which I wouldn't learn until several years later, but this man just leaped from a stage one to a stage seven with his rescuing me!  Needless to say, he made quite a first impression.

There might not have been a real fire in the hospital that day, but he had set my heart on fire.  I knew he was the one I would marry.  The ensuing love story is for another rainy day.  I am happy to say that over thirty years later, my hero, my husband, is still the love of my life.  And he is every bit the cowboy that I suspected he was.

Victoria M. Johnson knew by the time she was ten that she wanted to be a writer.  She loves telling stories and she's happiest when creating new characters and new plots.  Avalon Books and Montlake Romance published Victoria's fiction debut, The Doctor’s Dilemma, (A 2012 Bookseller’s Best double finalist).  Her other fiction book is a collection of romance short stories titled, The Substitute Bride and a novella, Hot Hawaiian Christmas. She is also the writer and director of four short films and two micro documentaries.   Visit Victoria's website at http://VictoriaMJohnson.com for inspiration and tips and find her Amazon author page or connect with her on Pinterest and Twitter.

I Am Not A Leg-Rubbing Hussy!

This month's topic, “how you met your spouse” would make for some pretty dry reading. I met him through his brother, with whom I worked. It was game night. A box of Trivial Pursuits. What can I say? It was the late 80s.

Instead, I wanted to tell you about the first “date”, which wasn’t so much a date as an arranged (by me) group purchase of tickets to Les Miserables, some tactical maneuvering (by me) to make sure I was sitting beside my future husband, followed by the twenty-three-year maligning of my character, (by him).

In recounting the story of our first not-quite-date-with-a-group-of-people-who-all-happened-to-purchase-a-block-of-tickets-to-Les-Mis, the love of my life maintains that I, “kept rubbing my leg against his” through the whole performance, making it impossible for him to be unaware of my blatant interest in him.

I protest!!! First, let me just say, I never, ever, EVER made the first move. But if I did decide to go outside my comfort zone and be the leg-rubbing-hussy that I’ve been accused of being, I would have been more creative than that. Sheesh! I write fiction, for cryin'-out-loud!

Just as an “off-the-top-of-my-head” scenario, it would have gone something like this: After jockeying for the ticketed seat beside his, I would have done something clever, like drop my program, waited for him to bend to pick it up, then gone down a fraction of a second later and head butted him into unconsciousness. Then it would simply have been a matter of dragging all six-foot-five-inches of him down a couple of flights of stairs, (no elevator in that theater), propping him up in a shadowy alcove while I drove the car around from the parking garage, and shoving his unconscious bulk into the backseat. Voila.

Or what if I had let that other woman in our group have that ticketed seat beside his, and I just marched down the aisle with an “excuse me. Pardon me. Excuse me,” checked my ticket, and told her, “there seems to be some sort of mistake here. I believe you have inadvertently received the ticket beside my future husband. Sorry. We’ll have to trade seats.”

(Rubbed my leg against his through the whole show. Pffft.)

A couple of years ago, we gave my daughter tickets to see Wicked. It was in the same theater where my husband and I saw Les Miserables so many years ago. I got to be the parent who got the other ticket and drove our pre-licensed teenaged daughter to see the show while my husband stayed at home with the too-squirmy-to-sit-through-the-show younger sibling. It was fabulous! It was “WICKED”. It was… cramped! 

During intermission, everyone stood, if not to race to the line forming at the restroom, then at least to stretch. There was a lovely gentleman seated beside me – his family fanned out down the aisle on his opposite side. As we all stood, stretching, he shook out his leg, and flexed his toes, cursing a cramp in his calf. He turned to me and said, “I am so sorry. The seats in this theater are so cramped. I promise you, I’m not intentionally brushing your leg with mine.” He was about the same height and breadth as my husband.

I should have had him write it in a note. Then I’d have written proof that I am not a leg-rubbing hussy!

Epilogue: The next day (after the first not-quite-a-date-with-a-group-of-people-from-work), my husband called me at work to invite me out for lunch. It was lovely, giddy, and ended when he walked me back to my office and left me with a hug and a promise to get-together again soon. ;) The rest is twenty-three years of history.

True Romance - The Beginning of My Love Story

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

Ah. Valentine’s Day – a day to celebrate love and romance. It’s been made a little cynical and commercial by the marketers of cards, candy, flowers and jewelry, but at heart it’s still a day to celebrate Romance with a capital R. By the way, am I the only one offended by the jewelry store commercials for all gift-giving seasons that imply if he gives you jewelry you should love him? I love jewelry and spend a lot of time wearing enough bling for a Christmas tree, but the idea that jewelry = love just doesn’t work for me.

Back to the subject. Romance. The (future) Husband and I had been dating about six weeks. He is a high-ranking military officer (now retired, thank goodness!) and an extremely reticent man. Reticent in that he doesn’t talk much at all or (then) didn’t believe in any public expression of affection, even to holding hands. When we crossed a street he would take my hand, then drop it like a hot potato once we were on the other side. (Thankfully that has all changed. Now we happily kiss in public, even while shopping for groceries.)

I had decided long ago that I wasn’t ever going to marry. I had been having too much fun being single, even to the extent of being engaged to three different men who lived on three different continents – all at the same time. Goodness, that was a fun year! Anyway, when The Husband-to-be and I started dating I was fifty and set in my ways. He was a number of years younger and had been divorced for twenty-some-odd years. Total rebachelorfication.

Anyway, it was Valentine’s Day and his gift to both of us was tickets to the Garth Brooks concert. You couldn’t buy specific seats – you bought admission and were assigned seats. The concert was in a local sports arena that held enough people to rival the population of a small European country, and it was packed – so totally sold out that Garth agreed to do another concert in the same venue and it sold out too. Our seats were up in the gods, about half a dozen rows from the roof. I had never been to a C&W concert before (my tastes are classical) and didn’t know any of the songs. It was a rude awakening. Garth would hit a chord, start to sing and after about three notes the audience would start screaming and yelling until the song was over, so you couldn’t hear anything. I had to listen to C&W on the radio for weeks afterward to hear what I had ‘heard’ at the concert.

Except for one song. When Garth sang the romantic ballad “If Tomorrow Never Comes – Will She Know How Much I Loved Her?” the audience was totally silent. All of us in the audience were standing – and most of us had been dancing in place to some of the livelier tunes – but in that huge arena you could almost hear a pin drop. Suddenly in the middle of the song The future Husband turned around, put his arms around me and gave me a passionate Technicolor MGM romantic-fade out kiss. (Remember, this is a man who didn’t even like to hold hands in public!) He didn’t quite bend me over backwards, but he might as well have. It was as romantic a kiss as I had ever had to then and for a moment – in our section, at least – we were getting as much attention as the show. About mid-way through this inspired osculation I decided that I wanted to marry this man.

Well, I would have married him the next day, but nothing is that easy. It took him three years to pop the question, but when he finally did get around to it, he did it with memorable panache – under a three-quarter moon in the beautiful English-style gardens of the Mena Hotel, a 5 star hostelry that started life as a khedive’s love nest/hunting lodge in Giza, across the street from the Pyramids. Yes, THOSE Pyramids.

I was a first time bride at 54, a move that many said was absolute insanity, that two strong-willed people used to living alone would tear each other apart. They were wrong. Ours is a blessed union, and he has never stopped doing romantic things. (I do for him, too, but that’s the subject of another blog.) Most of them are small, intimate things that matter only to us, but on occasion he goes over the top. For my birthday a couple of years ago he surprised me with a BMW X3 in my favorite blue. On our tenth wedding anniversary he took me to Paris (yes, THAT Paris) for a week. When he returned from his first deployment (an entire year!) to Iraq, he brought me a 23K gold, exquisitely carved bangle bracelet. No, jewelry does not equate love, but if you are already sure of the love, the jewelry is very nice.

True romance is the best, and it’s worth waiting for the right man. If we have any regrets, it’s that we didn’t meet twenty five years earlier, so that we could have had that many more years with each other. By the way, we do everything together. I go with him to his rocket and gem-and-mineral society meetings. He goes to my writers’ meetings (and a lot of conventions, too) with me. Life together is pleasure expanded exponentially. And that, my friends, is true romance.