Do You Believe in Love at First Sight? A Guest Post from Tessa Adams

(I'm pleased to welcome Tessa Adams, aka Tracy Wolff to my blog yet again. I especially like today's guest post, because it's a true life crazy romance story! ;)

For most of my life, I’ve heard that love at first sight is ridiculous, absurd, a complete misnomer—after all, it didn’t exactly work out well for Romeo and Juliet. And yet … there’s something about it that appeals to me as a writer and a person.

Maybe it’s because my father asked my mother to marry him exactly one week after their first date. She said yes, and they went to her favorite Chinese restaurant to celebrate, where she got a fortune cookie that said, Happy Marriage, fourteen children. She looked at my father and said, “Maybe we should reconsider.” Thankfully, they didn’t, and they were married for twenty-six years … and would be married still if my father hadn’t died unexpectedly a number of years ago.

Fast forward twenty-five years, to a little after my twenty-first birthday. I was a graduate student in New Orleans, with my whole life road-mapped in front of me—which included three graduate degrees, a teaching career at a prestigious university and a side job writing novels. I’d been dating a guy for well over a year, and though we’d been separated for half of that—which was causing a lot of problems between us-- we were still talking about the school we would go to in the future, where he could get his M.A. in journalism and I could get my Ph.D in American Literature. While every once in a while, I thought about where our relationship would end up—marriage and kids hadn’t even entered my mind. After all, we were young and the future was a long way away.

Anyway, the day I want to talk about was in February (the 21st to be exact), and a friend invited me to a dinner party at her apartment. I rushed home from class, threw on some make-up and a dress and hurried to her apartment, thinking I would be the last to arrive. Turns out I was the first.

A few minutes later there was a knock on the door and she asked me to get it as she and her husband were busy in the kitchen. I opened the door and to this day, I swear I was struck by a bolt of lightning. Or an arrow from Cupid’s bow, seven days too late. Whatever it was, it seemed to be affecting the man on the other side of the threshold as much as it was affecting me. We kind of stood there for a minute, staring at each other, eyes wide and mouths slightly agape. When I finally regained my senses enough to let him into the apartment, he delivered his hostess gift to my friend (something I hadn’t thought to bring) and then spent the rest of the evening sitting next to me and asking as many questions as possible.

We talked for hours that night, and through it all, my heart was pounding like a metronome on high. All I could think about was how handsome he looked in his blue polo shirt and how smart and funny he was and how good he smelled … you get the idea. It turns out he was spending a lot of the time thinking about unbuttoning the long row of buttons on the front of my burgundy Victoria’s Secret dress, but that’s another story, LOL. When he left without asking for my number, I was devastated, despite the fact that I already had a boyfriend. I consoled myself by hoping he would ask his friend (my friend’s husband) for my number. Alas, he didn’t (the fact that I had a boyfriend scared him off), and two days later I couldn’t help myself. I called him. We arranged for him to pick me up at my apartment the next night after work, and within minutes of hanging up the phone, I called my boyfriend and told him we needed to talk … It turned out, he’d been thinking the same thing, thank God, so the talk went very easily.

Anyway, the new guy took me out to dinner and a 12:30 movie and I was so tired from studying for mid-terms that I fell asleep on him right in the middle of the movie. I figured that was the end of it—I mean, who falls asleep in the middle of a first date? But he was really nice about it and after I kissed him (did I mention he was a little shy) he asked me out for the next afternoon.

We started our date feeding the ducks at a nearby park, and when all the bread was gone, he took me over to one of the little gazebos near the pond and told me that he loved me and wanted to marry me. My eyes almost bugged out of my head, needless to say. I was only twenty-one, he was twenty-eight and while I had heard my parents’ story a million times, they’d been nearly thirty when they’d met. I told him I barely knew him, blah, blah, blah, and yet didn’t go running screaming into the night. Instead, I thought about his words for a week and when he asked me to marry him again, eight days later, I said yes.

We were married within two and a half months, and just about nine months later, we had our first child. We now have three children, the oldest of whom is thirteen, and we just celebrated our fourteenth wedding anniversary. Has it been easy? No, of course not. But has it been right—absolutely, and I don’t regret for one second throwing caution to the wind and marrying this man that I was madly in love with.

My friends at school thought it was crazy, my parents (who had no room to talk) cautioned me about making such a swift decision when I was so young, my best friend in the world told me I was freaking nuts. And I did it anyway—why? Because from the moment that first lightning bolt struck, I knew we were meant to be together.

Maybe that’s why things always happen fast in the novels I write. In almost all of them, my characters know pretty soon after meeting that they’ve met someone special, someone who is going to turn their lives upside down. In my new novel, Dark Embers, which is my first paranormal and the beginning of the Dragon’s Heat series, Dylan knows from the second he lays eyes on Phoebe that she is going to be someone important in his life. Though she is human and he is a shifter and King of the Dragonstar clan, he can’t ignore the way she makes him feel. She’s wrong for him, wrong for his clan and though he knows he’ll eventually have to let her go, he isn’t strong enough to do it yet. Not before he knows what it’s like to be loved by her …

So what do you think? Do you believe in love at first sight or do you think it needs to grow steadily for a couple of years before you leap into a serious commitment like marriage?