It Was Love When...: Tales from the Beginning of Love

By Robert Elder

He told me I was a penguin: "tiny, adorable, and loved by everyone."

TALES FROM THE BEGINNING OF LOVE

It may be after three days together, or after three months-it's that moment when it all falls together. From heartfelt declarations to all-knowing smiles, It Was Love When .. captures that moment when love is just beginning.

I thought to myself, "I love him more than Spider-Man loves Mary Jane."
I was looking through his iTunes when I realized that our playlists were nearly identical.
Suddenly he turned off the lights and told me to look up at the ceiling. Glow-in-the-dark stars covered the entire ceiling, spelling out "I love you."

Both addictive and heartwarming, It Was Love When... is a freeze frame of that moment when you realize that you're truly,completely in love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sourcebooks
• Release date: Dec 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781402272653

Robert Elder

Robert Elder is assistant professor of history at Valparaiso University.

Book preview

Copyright

Copyright © 2011 by Robert K. Elder

Cover and internal design © 2011 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

Cover design by Jennifer K. Beal Davis, jennykate.com

Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

[phone]

Fax: [phone]

www.sourcebooks.com

Elder, Robert K.

It was love when— : tales from the beginning of love / by Robert K. Elder.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Dating (Social customs)—Humor. 2. Mate selection—Humor. 3. Love—Humor. I. Title.

PN6231.D3E438 2011

818’.60208--dc23

2011031259

contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Surprising

Strange

Super

Sexy

Sweet

About the Author

Back Cover

To Betsy

Who loves me despite my obsessions.

And deadlines. And quirks.

All my books are for you,

but this one especially.

acknowledgements

First, thanks to our readers and contributors. Without your stories and enthusiasm, there simply would be no book, no website. Thanks for continuing to submit stories and helping spread the word.

My eternal gratitude goes out to Doug Peterson, the founding webmaster and tech guru behind ItWasOverWhen.com and ItWasLoveWhen.com. We spent a summer of extremely late, sleepless nights ironing out glitches and coping with overwhelming traffic, but he was always collected and cool. So thanks, Doug.

A special note of thanks goes out to my friends Jason Bitner, Andrew Huff, and Scott Smith, all of whom gave me invaluable early advice about the sites.

Thanks to film director Kevin Smith (@thatkevinsmith) for writing early on about ItWasOverWhen.com on Twitter. You helped us go viral. And crashed the site.

Hats off to my friends for providing the first anonymous seed stories, which helped start the websites. Among them are: Marc Calvary, Adrienne Clem, Lauren Graham, Esther Kang, Nicole Kristal, Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, Linda McCarty, Billie Oshana, Suzanna Naramore, Sam Parks, Becky Roberts, Bill Savage, Sasha Schwenk, Christine Whitmer Soileau, Shannon Terry, and Aaron Vetch.

I also had some help editing stories and running the websites from superstar editorial assistants Doni Bloomfield, Olivia Bobrowsky, Lisa Cisneros, Luke Fiedler, Alex Glenn, Marcella De Laurentiis, Kasia Dworzecka, Kelin Hall, Drew Hunt, Shajiah Jaffri, Joey Kahn, Katherine Koster, Samantha Leal, Theodore Nobel, SunJung Monica Park, Daniel Peake, Sofia Resnick, Cheryl Rossetti, Angie Rutkowski, Alexandra Sifferlin, Chelsea Trembly, Bryan West, and Emily Wray.

Special thanks to Jessica Galliart for her thoughtful edits and story choice on the first draft of this book.

Thanks to Jon Resh for the amazing cover, which he furiously designed while taking care of his first infant child.

Thanks to my editor at Sourcebooks, Shana Drehs, who believed in this book (and its sister, It Was Over When: Tales of Romantic Dead Ends) and relentlessly pursued the projects. David Dunton, my tireless agent, is just too cool for words.

Thanks to my brother, Chad, and mom, Tina, for editing the last batch of these stories during an NFL playoff weekend. And to my three-year-old twins, Dylan and Eva, who usually respond well to, Not now, Daddy is working. This morning, Dylan pointed at my pen and said, Let me have that…we all do it. I’m sure we’ll all be editing together soon enough, little man.

Thanks also to my digital family: the amazing editors and staff at AOL Huffington Post Media’s Patch.com—most notably Sherry Skalko, Marcia Parker, Brian Farnham, and Warren Webster.

None of this, of course, would have been possible without the love, support, and good humor of my lovely bride, Betsy. These websites were built over my hobo summer, when I found myself unemployed and adrift at sea. She continues to be my compass home.

This book is for her and her alone.

Love,

Rob

Robert K. Elder

Chicago, August 2011

introduction

It’s that spark.

It Was Love When is an impossible kind of documentary work, in that I’ve set out to bottle lightning, to capture stories of the exact moment we realize we’re in love.

I say realize because very often love sneaks up on us. We often don’t realize we’re in love until the right mix of chemistry, comfort, and passion finds us. Eventually, we call it love. Some of us can’t help it. Others fight it. Very few of these stories are the fabled love at first sight. Most often, I found while collecting stories for this book, love is a groundswell—an overwhelming of the heart, mind, body, and spirit.

Before I get too schmaltzy here, I want to point out that this project for me is essentially a work of journalism—a bit of story gathering and anthropology. Although love drives us, shapes our lives, and provides the foundation for 99 percent of all pop songs, we still understand relatively little about its nature.

What I love (to overuse the word) about working on this project is talking to couples. They share the same love even though they found themselves in love at different times, in different ways.

And, I have to say, I’m comforted by those stories in which relationships end, but the writers still recognize their experiences as love, as something that comforted and shaped them. Love that doesn’t last is still love. Too often, I think, people discount romances that end as something less than love—which is a disservice to themselves and the people in their lives. The experience of falling in love helps make us who we are.

It Was Love When was inspired by my lovely wife, in part because of her reaction to the sister book in this series, It Was Over When: Tales of Romantic Dead Ends.

She hates it.

She thinks those stories are shallow, petty, and arbitrary. I disagree—nothing could be more human (and humorous and tragic) than the stutter-steps before we find love. There’s nothing arbitrary about chemistry and

Reviews for It Was Love When...

[thothj · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Funny and sweet tales of how people discovered true love. It was fun to read and made me for than a little envious of these people's happiness.