He’s a charmer!

If you overlook him plying me with drinks from the open bar, the story of how The Husband and I began dating is quite a romantic one. But it’s easy to be romantic at a beautiful wedding with music and dancing, wooing me long-distance while I traveled around the world was a much more daunting task.

I did a share of the work, by booking my off weeks to visit him in Toronto as much as I could, but when The Husband was merely The Boyfriend, he went well beyond phone calls and e-mails to court me. (Ha! I just realized how funny him “courting” me sounds… considering I was a tennis umpire and he’s a lawyer!)

Over the eighteen months that we dated long distance, here are just a few of the amazing romantic surprises I experienced.

11 Romantic surprises from the early days

1) Not long after our first date, I was stricken with strep throat and he called my hotel where I was bedridden and tried to order soup for me from room-service. The kitchen only had French Onion so it didn’t pan out, but how sweet was that?!?

2) On our first Christmas, he gave me a bottle of my favourite perfume. I was stunned, we hadn’t spent that much time together yet. He had remembered a fleeting incident on one of our early dates… the waitress at brunch asked me what scent I was wearing.

3) That same Christmas, he also gave me a St. Christopher’s medal to keep me safe when I travelled.

4) I checked into a hotel in New York to find he had ordered a dozen red roses to be waiting for me in my room.

5) On my birthday he gave me a hardcover copy of an out-of-print book that I loved. Months earlier, in passing, I had mentioned that I had loaned my old paperback copy to someone and had never gotten it back. He searched for a copy and found one in a used book store.

6) He mailed Autumn leaves to me when I was working in the south, knowing I was homesick and missing the change of seasons.

7) He had a beautifully soft pillowcase embroidered, telling me he loved me, so that I would have it with me when I went to sleep every night wherever I was.

8) Without me knowing, he took my broken watch and had it repaired. He had it waiting for me the next time we met up.

9) He wrote a card to the woman from whom I rented a room for three weeks every year at Wimbledon, thanking her for taking such good care of me!

10) Another gorgeous bouquet of roses to my sister’s apartment when I was visiting her for a ski break in Whistler!

11) He flew down to visit me when I was working in Florida. I returned late to the hotel room one night and he had shopped for snacks. We laid in bed and ate Doritos and drank beer. (That’s when I knew I would marry him.)

This is really just the tip of the iceberg. I still have the stacks of love letters and cards from those days…

Now that our lives are filled with school concerts and hockey, it is easy to lose sight of the old romantic days when it was just the two of us. Well, today I was reminded of how romantic my guy can be.

See the picture of that big, beautiful bouquet of flowers? The Husband had those delivered to me at work today. There was no occasion. Just a card saying, “I love you,”

My heart’s all aflutter. Sigh…

What was the most romantic surprise you’ve received?