Coincidence, fate, or magic?

I’m writing to you because I want to give hope to anyone out there that is searching for love and romance.

I am a forty-three year old man who has been fairly successful in business.  I have several friends whom I treasure and a brother who has been happily married for years.

I, on the other hand, never married and really never thought of myself as a father.  I was quite content leading a rather carefree and responsibility-free life.

But about six months ago, I awoke one morning, looked in the mirror at my receding hairline and suddenly found myself depressed with the prospect of living the rest of my life alone.

What a sad awakening.

For the next several weeks, my mind was obsessed with visions of a wife and children.  My friends would call me and invite me to their homes for dinner, and a few of my single friends would invite me out for the evening, but my heart was heavy with sadness and regret.

A close friend of mine, a doctor, recommended I needed to get away.  He handed me a pamphlet listing cruises to Mexico, the Caribbean, even Alaska.  And before I knew it, I was boarding this giant ship that looked to me like a floating hotel.  It was several stories high and I felt like an ant walking up the ramp.

After three days, I was going crazy.  All I could see were couples holding hands or dads carrying their kids.  If anything, my depression was growing more intense.  I was not impressed with my friend’s recommendation.  After all he was a medical doctor, not a shrink.

Then on the fourth day, I was sitting in the lounge nursing a Diet Coke.  I had given up drinking a year earlier.  Years of carousing had taken its toll.  I was in my usual funk when I noticed an attractive woman seated with two other women.  I couldn’t help but stare at her, and then something happened that I will never forget.

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye and I saw her lips kind of curl upward.  It was the most innocent and beautiful smile I had ever seen.  It was then that I regained that spark.  I drummed up the courage to walk over to them, introduced myself, and soon I found myself looking into the eyes of someone I knew I would know a long, long time.

Her name is Charlene and the next day she told me that she had a premonition the previous morning that she would meet the man she had been searching for.  We are making plans so we can be that couple I referred to earlier, and I can be that man holding his kids.

Darren Markowitz
Cleveland, Ohio