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Love at first sight seems illogical, unless you have suffered a head blow and subsequent damage to the frontal lobe. Yet we often rely on an intuition that transcends logic and succumb to that moment of electricity when two people make an instantaneous connection. Call it ‘falling madly, head-over-heels in love.’ It can happen to anyone, and it makes no sense whatsoever.

We’ve all found ourselves drawn to someone by a compelling nuance-an impish smile, a wistfulness in the eye, even when logic is stacked against a liaison. Friends and family are usually quick to point out that you could do better. Sometimes they are right, but not always. That improbable person can also prove to be a loving and supportive partner, especially if their life has already taken them to the brink of disaster and afforded them an empathy seldom developed in a sheltered life.

Regardless of love-at-first-sight connections, the relationship still demands hard work. In our society of instant gratification, building a relationship may not seem worth the

effort. But love is layered, like the ocean. To achieve deep and fulfilling love, you need time. To paraphrase a Native American adage: “A relationship of two depends on the patience of one. Living ‘happily ever after’ is a derivative of perseverance. The Grimm Brothers understood that when they wrote their fairy tales. Their characters had to work their way through a morass of traumatic events to achieve a happy ending. The fact remains: there is a distinct difference between an intuitive recognition of inherent good qualities in a potential mate versus the raging hormones that override common sense. The proliferation of divorce court television demonstrates this trend in bad choices. But it’s also possible to let the right person slip through your fingers.

I almost did. He called at my business to ask me out. I was overwhelmed, multi-tasking, I didn’t have time for a casual call so I cut our conversation short. Then an intuitive voice urged me to call him back.

It is during such small interludes of quietude that life-changing decisions are often made. They seem insignificant at the time, like a butterfly flitting past the window then whisked away by an errant wind. Thirty-nine years later, this gentle man helped me care for my mother as she succumbed to Alzheimer’s.

“You have such beautiful hair,” she often told him, and asked if he was her boyfriend. She clearly didn’t remember that she had disapproved of our marriage, telling me I could do better than marry a divorcee with children.

That might have been true, but I couldn’t have married a kinder person. A gut feeling-call it instinct-overrode logic. It’s not logical to argue that instinct is a hundred percent reliable, yet it does seem logical to assume that we are the sum total of our desires. As a rule of thumb, if you send good energy and positive action out into the universe, it will serendipitously come back to you.

Published in Stories