Miracle Monday: Love Across an Ocean
Published: November 8, 2005
When you meet the love of your life, you just know. You know it’s right, you know it’s meant to be, you know you’re done searching.
Alan Hartley knew.
“Soon as I saw her, I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve got to get to know this lady,’” he says with a grin.
For Alan, that great moment came when he was 22-years-old and attending grad school in England, where he would meet a young American named Elizabeth.
“She’s got the prettiest smile I think I’ve ever seen in my life and the biggest, sparkly eyes,” he says.
She was studying abroad - as outgoing as Alan was shy - and had no romantic interest in the nameless guy who blended into the background.
“Finally, I’d known him for weeks and he finally said, my name is Alan,” remembers Elizabeth. “After that, I started noticing him like, ‘Don’t you remember me? I was the cute one, the one you like,’” she laughs. “He played me like a fiddle.”
A tune that hit it’s beat during spring break. Elizabeth had plans to visit Paris with a friend, but there was a problem - neither one of them spoke French, Alan did.
“He said, sure, he’d go be our tour guide and interpreter and everything and right before we left, the friend bailed out, had other plans and so it was just the two of us, so our real first date was this week in Paris,” Elizabeth recalls.
On that trip, Elizabeth fell for him. So much so, that one afternoon at the base of the Eiffel Tower an older Frenchman couldn’t help but notice.
“He came walking up to us very deliberately and he leaned down to him and handed him a stack of crepes and said something in French and then started kind of chuckling and walked away,” Elizabeth says. “I said, you know, ‘What was that all about?’ and he said apparently that we looked like we were so much in love we’d probably forgotten to eat that day.”
That feeling lasted five weeks before Elizabeth returned to the U.S. and their long distance relationship began.
“Every Friday he would walk to the next village at 11:00 at night and I would rush home from work and we would talk on the phone for a half hour every Friday night,” she says.
Months of long distance turned into years and eventually they decided to get married. They set the date for Easter weekend 1991. Alan booked plane tickets and applied for a visa, but one week before the wedding, everything fell apart.
The travel agency went bankrupt, the U.S. Embassy lost his passport and on his way to get a new one, a gust of wind blew away his birth certificate, leaving Alan desperate for a miracle.
“I got down on my knees in front of this Jamaican lady and said ‘Please!’ and she said, ‘Oh, come here, lovey’ and she took me around the back and processed everything that day,” says Alan.
He arrived in America just two days before he and Elizabeth would finally become husband and wife.
“You should have seen her in her wedding gown, she just looked lovely,” Alan says, grinning at Elizabeth.
Their long distance love affair, though, wasn’t over yet. Alan spent the next six months in England finishing school, then came home for good.
“When it was happening, we didn’t think anything of it. It was just hurdles all the way and we just kind of went over them, we didn’t think about it, we just went over them, as soon as they came, we went over them and when we look back - it seems like, how did we do that?” Alan says.
But they did - because as the saying goes - they both just knew. No matter what they had to overcome, the outgoing American girl was meant to be with the shy British boy.
“To this day, we’ve been married almost 15 years and he’s exactly who I thought he was. He’s still the nicest, kindest person and it just gets better and better,” says Elizabeth.
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