Sunday, March 17, 2019

An Even Better Love Story

Saturday night (3.9), I officiated Jessica and Matthew’s wedding ceremony, at the Four Seasons Resort and Club Dallas at Las Colinas, in Irving, Texas. Here are the remarks I shared with them and their guests:

Roll back the tape to right before their first date, and you probably would not predict we would end up here tonight. Just listen to Jessica and Matt’s descriptions going in.

Jessica says, “I had been extremely unsuccessful in the dating world, so I had little expectations walking into the coffee shop.” She adds, “I had recently been on a trip to South Africa and loved it, so the fact that he was South African was intriguing. I knew even if the date was bad, I would enjoy the accent.” Talk about damning with faint praise!

Matt recounts how he had ended a relationship, and so he was not interested in, “anything that could resemble a long term relationship.” Despite that, Matt says that they, “seemed to click immediately in the messages that we sent.”


Even after their first date, Matt says, “I had told Jessica that I wanted to keep things casual early on and she agreed.” However, this is where things began to turn, because Matt admits, “the amount of time that we were spending together did not show that this was a casual relationship.” Jessica sums it up well when she says, “By the time we got to New Year’s Eve, despite insisting that we were very casual, it was evident that we had a real connection.”

Ronald Reagan once said, that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Jessica and Matt might agree, that in their case this was true. One bright day when Matt was told by his company that his services were no longer needed, the added coda to that from our government was, “See ya!”

Fortunately, Jessica stepped up to the plate. As Matt says, “Jess did everything that she could to try help me. She offered to let me move in with her since my lease was expiring and sell whatever I had accumulated in the US (she seemed a little too eager to sell all of my stuff) while I tried to figure out what my next step would be.”

Still, leave he had to, and Jessica says, “He left, and our relationship was rather undefined as we figured the distance would make things impossible.”

Then, something pretty incredible happened.  Jessica says, “It was that distance however that sealed our relationship. As hard as the past two years have been living apart, it is what has cemented our lives together. The distance made us both realize how much we loved each other and wanted to spend our lives together.”

Matt agrees: “I would not have realized how important she was to me to me or the depth of our love without leaving the US. Now, all I want is to be back with her and to start our life together, to make her laugh and to see the expressions that she makes, in person, when I rile her up.”

Now, though Jessica and Matt talk about these circumstances as the cause for their deepening love, I believe they are being a little too humble. None of this happened automatically. The deepening and cementing of their love story is due to Jessica and Matt making a choice. They would not allow their love to end. They would rise above their circumstances. They would harness their adversity to write an even better love story. And, that is a great lesson for all of us.

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