This is the girl who spent most of her teens and frankly -until just a few years ago, worrying about being fat. This is the young woman who dreaded the bus ride home from school, because a gang of neighborhood boys followed her home yelling to her about how she was as fat as a whale….. every day for what seemed like forever. This is the young woman who tried every diet, spent a short time bingeing and purging in the ninth grade (until her mother caught her and followed her into the bathroom for six months, until she was sure that her beloved daughter had stopped that behavior). This is the young woman who was sexually molested by a family friend at age 15-and as disgusting and gross as that made her feel, also felt to some degree thankful that a man finally found her attractive.

She worried all through high school about why she didn’t have a boyfriend. She had lots of boys that were friends and lots of boys that seemed to like her, but none of them seemed to want to kiss her.

Fast forward to freshman year of college, when suddenly, for some inexplicable reason, there were lots of boys who wanted to kiss her. This was very confusing. She had not changed anything about her looks, she still looked the same as she did in high school….Needless to say, after years of worrying about being unattractive, and then suddenly finding herself attractive – things went a little bit nutty for a while. She had a serious boyfriend for the first two years of college which thankfully saved her from all sorts of terrible things that would have probably happened without him.

The bad part was when he decided he didn’t want to be with her anymore. She thought it was the end of the world. LITERALLY. This caused her to go into a tailspin that frankly should have had her hospitalized…..

Then the opposite happened. Lots of boys wanted to kiss her but none of them wanted to call and talk to her on the phone, or take her out to dinner, or go for a walk in the park or see a movie…… There were a few long-term relationships in there but none of them ever turned out well – until the day she met a blue-eyed adventurous sea captain sitting on the barstool next to her. By that time she was 30 and extremely confused about love……and what it was supposed to look like.

Thankfully, the sea captain was the kind of guy who didn’t give up. He was very patient with her. He still mostly is. And because of him she started to feel pretty and loved and appreciated.

The way that she should have felt when she was 13.