Steve Kemme, Cincinnati Journalist

As a young man, I had no burning desire to get married. In fact, I consciously avoided it. During one period in my 20s, I made a rule never to go out with someone two weekends in a row. The purpose was to safeguard myself from falling in love and getting married.

I enjoyed the freedom of being single, of going where I wanted to go, doing what I wanted and not being tied down. My strategy during those few years was very effective. I never came close to becoming engaged. There were long stretches where I didn’t date anyone.

In my early 30s, I decided to give myself a chance to fall in love. I began to feel the need to share my life with someone. So I dropped my self-imposed draconian dating rule. Before long, I did fall in love with someone. I realized it because I found myself thinking about being married to her. While having these thoughts, I felt pretty relaxed about it. Before, such a thought would have given me the shudders. But that relationship didn’t end in marriage. After dating for a year, she decided I was becoming too serious about her and broke up with me. I absorbed the blow, but felt consoled a little in knowing I was capable of falling love. I no longer viewed love and marriage as necessarily bad and came to see their potentially positive aspects.

A couple of years later, a friend of mine encouraged me to put an ad in the dating section of Cincinnati Magazine. I did, but received only a few responses. I altered my ad and resubmitted it a couple of months later. The new ad was more expansive and less rigid in its language. I ended it by saying I had a yearning for true romance, which wasn’t a ploy to attract women. I really meant it.

I received 30 responses, a veritable avalanche. After meeting 17 of them for either lunch, a drink after work or a date, I settled on Karen. On our second date, we discovered our fathers had graduated from the same high school in 1938. They also had attended the same religious retreat around 1970 and were standing behind each other in the retreat photograph. After dating for three months, I felt like I wanted to marry Karen. Finally, after six months of dating, I proposed and she accepted.

Love sometimes leads to marriage, but sometimes chance and strange coincidences play just as important a part. For a chance encounter to matter, I had to shed my fear of love. But even with a new attitude, I needed a little nudge from Lady Luck.