After two long term relationships while in my 20's, I was just enjoying the life I had. As a rep and manager for a Fortune 500, I was on the road constantly for almost ten years and my relationship with the opposite sex was pretty well relegated to the girls at the home office, the branch administrators, and a long line of one-nighters. I'm frankly ashamed to some degree that a lot of these women would be unrecognizable to me in the morning......and probably me to them also. In short, I'd given up ever finding the mate that I had expected I would find many years before. I had one cardinal rule. NEVER accept a blind date from some well meaning "matchmaker."

So.......Being ill and generally feeling awful, I had just finished a training session and one of the new hires walked in and said, "Pat, how would you like to meet a nice girl?" I was too tired to argue and after a few futile stabs at it, gave up and arranged to meet this "nice girl" on Thursday evening.

I had avoided blind dates for years. If you're past 25 and single, EVERYBODY is trying to fix you up. The woman brought her stepdaughter and I brought a friend to help bale me out of this mess. Twenty minutes into the conversation I was convinced that here was the woman I wanted to marry. We shuffled the two "chaperones" out the door after the first drink and spent the evening together talking long into the night.   We couldn't meet again until four days later and the first thing I did then was ask her to marry me...she accepted. I kinda' sensed it then but have since become certain I was marrying my best friend. Now I'm 61 and know for sure that I made the right choice. Luckily, she feels the same.

James Dickey in his novel "Deliverance" in describing the relationship one of his characters found with his wife said, "He didn't know what it was before, but he had been looking for a flame within.....and when he found it, or at least the spark, he married it."

I wasn't "looking" when I met Karen and if asked I could not have described what I was looking for......but I saw something in her, or at least a vestige of it, and I knew I had found the unknown thing I had always looked for..............No man ever loved a woman as I love Karen. She's my best friend and the greatest thing that ever happened in my life.


Spaw