I love stories, maybe because I am in one, and I collect them. Think how wonderful the news would be if it ever included a love story, or if it included them every day. Part of awakening, I believe, is to know that there are so many love stories out there,and they are just as important as the angry men and women shouting at one another.

I heard one such story tonight. A woman in her 60’s, a strong, educated and loving woman, worked to stay inside a loveless and cold marriage for nearly 30 years. Her husband was an angry man, judgmental, quick to lose his temper, belittling and controlling. Not that rare a story, sadly, we hear it all the time. She had given up on doing better. Not easy to find love when you are over 40, she was told. And told. No movies about that in the theaters, no shows on TV, no CD’s with that story.

One day she discovered just what an awful man her husband was, and she went to a lawyer and left him. She had wonderful friends, did her good work, had a full life, but she was still, lonely, yearning for a companion that the world told her was not likely to ever appear. She subscribed to an online dating service for the first time in her life  – it was Match.com – she said, and went through one poor match and another and was about to quit when she came home and saw a message from a man who said he would make a perfect match for the right woman. Hmmmphhh, she said, how cheeky, and then she wrote back and said she would be a perfect match for the right man.

They had dinner the next week, they fell in love, they share a love of animals,  talk to one another all day and are soon to start traveling the world. “I almost gave up on it,” she said, “but I couldn’t. Some voice told me not to. We love each other so much and I never thought it could happen.”

How wonderful my friend is, to never give up on love, even when the world told her to. I didn’t give up on it either, and I told her this and we teared up on the telephone a bit. After a rainbow, a true love story.