Love in Strange Places

What is the perfect place to find true love? Most likely it’s not a question you’ve pondered, and yet you probably do have a pretty clear idea of the scenario. You’ll meet your man in a gorgeously romantic setting while you’re looking your best and feeling on top of your game.

Certainly you don’t think of finding true love in your kitchen at the end of a terrible day at work, or when you’re a passenger in a semi-truck being driven by a handsome stud -- and you’re vomiting because you’re pregnant with another man’s baby! And yet, IT happens. You can stumble into true love in the most decidedly unromantic places and under some pretty shocking conditions – as you are about to discover through the stories in this collection.

True love – thank goodness! -- has also been found when you decide to literally escape from a twisted “love” -- such as a stalker’s crazed obsession or a father’s incestuous possession. The genuine love these women eventually found was all the more glorious when juxtaposed against the terror of their past.

Then there’s the failure of merely good-enough love, which can lead you to despair of ever finding true love. To protect your fragile heart, you might play mind games by telling yourself that you don’t care about true love or that you aren’t looking for it or that you don’t need it to be happy. You will read stories here, however, where that ruse eventually just didn’t hold up in the face of a beckoning true love. Ultimately you have to risk shedding your defenses – and the disappointments of your romantic past – in order to slip into true love.

So if you enjoy asking couples, “How did you two meet?” be prepared for a wild ride of answers to that question in these stories. Spoiler Alert: True love is going to find you no matter how down and dirty you look or feel about yourself, how unglamorous the setting, how traumatic your past or present is. True love, as it turns out, writes a new story for every couple.