My love

When I first met Andy I instantly liked and trusted him. He seemed like a no-nonsense man, wholesome and healthy, like a loaf of home baked bread, an all-round nice guy. We decided to see each other again and each time we did, I would go back to my friends afterwards and say “You know, he’s a really nice guy,” and the next time I’d come back saying “He’s a really, really nice guy”. I kept placing more “really, really, really’s” in front of the “nice guy”. And that’s how I slowly fell in love with him.

Up to that point, I had always thought what most people think and what the media constantly tells us, namely that love followed lust. This whole notion of “love at first sight” and butterflies in your stomach when you meet someone. Yes, I’m sure that you can have those butterflies and end up loving that person in the long run too, but quite often the love flutters off as soon as the butterflies do.

My butterflies for Andy crept in slowly, but have never stopped creeping in. I love him more now than last year and more today than yesterday. Over the years he has become the person that I always knew he could be, strong, courageous, incredibly intelligent and with a fiercely independent mind.

When we first met we were both young and often stupid. He reminded me of a puppy dog, bouncing all over the place, getting drunk and silly & often just not acting “cool”. Being “cool” was something that was very important to me at the time (I told you we were both young and rather stupid), but for some reason I always turned a blind eye to Andy’s silly behaviour, because I could see what was underneath it all. He must have been able to look through my silliness too or we wouldn’t have stuck together all this time.

I once read a quote by a woman who’d been married for over 70 years. When she was asked how they did it, she said: “The trick is to never fall out of love at the same time.” What a wonderful piece of advise and how true it is. Andy and I have been together for nearly ten years now and I have to admit, I don’t always love him. There are days, even weeks when I’m not in love at all. It’s not that I don’t like him during those times, but I’m just not “in love”. Still, like the ebb and the flow and the waxing and the waning of the moon, the loving feelings always come back, stronger and deeper than before.

Oh, and next to loving him, can I just say how proud I am of him too? In this last year, he has taught himself how to do search engine optimization. And he is now, without a doubt, one of the best Webmasters in the world. Our site Greendragonbelize.com has become front page (generally top 5) on Google, MSN & Yahoo. Just type in “Family Adventure travel” or “Belize Vacation” or “Belize Holidays” etc. and you’ll see how well we’ve done. For instance, for the search “All-inclusive family travel” there are more than 102,000,000 pages on the web & our site is ranked at number 4.

I guess I’m just lucky, the man that I have fallen in love with over the years has managed to find his own genius yet again. He was a genius on the football field and now he is a genius computer geek (You know that geeks rule the world these days, right?) And on top of all this, he is a great dad too.

So girls, don’t overlook the nice guys out there. They really are the ones to go for. Don’t believe the hype of the media. True love grows slowly and lasts. At least ours has for almost a decade and I expect it to continue to do so.