If you do not love yourself how can you love another?

Names: Cathy & Earle

Status: Married

Been together since: 1971

Cathy: It was August 1971. I met Earle when we started working for a mail machine company in Washington DC in the same department. I was the ‘important’ secretary of the big manager and he as the ‘lowly’ employee who used to answer service calls when someone had a technical problem like machine jams.

We started on the same day, a Monday, and he asked me out on Wednesday. I said absolutely not. This was because I didn’t want to date someone that I was working with for one thing, but the real issue was that he had just had a fresh haircut and looked like a little kid who had just graduated from high school as well as a total nerd. Here I was; this mature and sophisticated 21 year-old. He asked me to think about it and I said I would.

He came by first thing the next morning he asked me if I had thought about it and if I had changed my mind. I told him I didn’t date younger guys. He asked me how old I thought he was and I said, “You look like you just graduated from high school!” and he promptly told me he was 22 and had just graduated from college. I didn’t believe him and outright started laughing when he told me he had graduated from Transylvania University – it sounded funny and I thought he had just made it up. Little did I know that it was actually quite a prestigious university founded in 1789 in Lexington, Kentucky, by Thomas Jefferson.

He managed to persuade me to go out with him.

I spent the moments between then and our first date repeating over and over again to anyone who would listen that I didn’t want to go out with him. I kept telling my friends he just sits around writing things the whole day and looks like such a nerd.

I used to rent a room for 12 Dollars a week from Mrs. Hattery, my landlord. He was about to arrive to pick me up for our date and I was also telling her that I just didn’t want to date him.

Then he arrived and she met him. She shook his hand and then found a quiet moment with me and said, “This one’s a winner – he’s got a great handshake!” One handshake and he had won her over. I thought, ‘Well, that’s just not going to do it for me.’

Out we went… and what do you know – I fell head over heels in love with him that very night.