How does one start a book on relationships?  It is a question that I have wrestled with often.  My best attempt (for now) is below.  I decided to begin with a "Preface" to explain why I am writing the book and what it will cover, before jumping in to the argument.

“Goodbye, Matt.”

With a smile and a beauty-pageant wave, she turned, bounded up the steps, and was gone. Her brown hair, neatly tied in a stylish side-ponytail, and her bubbling laughter disappeared behind her faded brown door while I stood on the sidewalk below, gazing up at a goddess disappearing into heaven.

Pulse pounding and palms sweating, I began my slow walk home. As I left her house, I resisted the growing desire for “the look-back,” the inevitable turn to discover whether she was watching me walk away. Inevitably, I gave in, hoping to see her look down on me as Juliet may have looked on Romeo. The intoxicating anticipation of hope gave way to the crushing taste of disappointment. It was not to be. At least not today. I consoled myself with thoughts of the next morning when I would meet her again to walk to school: I was so in love.

I was also in the second grade. Second graders who are in love have relatively few options for interacting with the opposite sex, so I spent my days slyly maneuvering to be math-partners. I knew that once she discovered my brilliance at addition and subtraction—I had easily reached the fifth grade level—she would return my ardent affection. I spent my nights dreaming of dramatic rescues and glorious triumphs. My imagination would run wild: displays of glory on fields of battle and sport would result in her running into my arms and joyfully burying her tear-stained face in my shoulder. I wanted her to see beyond my badly formed teeth and tendency to cry to the confident and compassionate man that I had buried deep within.

Such dreams were all I would have. Six months later, we left Montana for a small town in Western Washington. I spent the trip in the delightful agony of remembering all the laughs from our daily walks home and pondering all the happy endings now locked in the closet that houses things ‘possible.’ I persuaded myself that the way of love was closed to me—no real romantic could give himself to two women and I had given myself once. To do so again would be a blasphemy against Love itself.

Not surprisingly, I would love again, only then it would be with a deeper intensity and a more mature purpose. I would love many times more and would experience the rending heartache of rejection nearly as often. I never ‘dated’ causally or flippantly, nor did I date promiscuously. My experience was marked instead by a suffocating seriousness that frightened girls not yet ready for marriage. At least that’s how I rationalized it. The girls would almost certainly say otherwise.

After twenty two years of trying and failing, I finally managed to get someone to say a permanent “Yes” to me. Like so many young men my age, my voyage through romance was marked more by shipwreck than success. If anyone is a “hero of this age,” it’s me: I understand the vices that afflict modern youth all too well. Through a series of painful lessons, I have begun to identify and correct those vices. This book is a product of that process—it is an explanation and defense of the lessons I have learned on my journey to marriage. And this chapter is an explanation and defense of this book.

 Exit question:  Are you 'hooked' at all?  Or is it too 'schmaltzy'?