My Own Personal Love Story: How Many Canadians Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb?

Have you read the first blog post in this series? Read it here!

When I’d asked the friend who set me up on my blind date with Paul if he and I would have anything in common, it turned out she’d overlooked something big: we were both Canadian.

In fact, it wasn’t just Canada that we had in common—we were both from the City of Toronto.

We spent hours that first date talking about our childhoods. Where we’d grown up, where we’d gone to church and school, how we’d ended up in Boston. We went from dinner to a movie, then stayed out talking until 2:00 am.

The next day, I called my friend and thanked her for giving Paul my number. “We had such a good time,” I gushed. “He’s so nice!”

“Wow,” she said, sounding a little surprised that we’d actually hit it off. “Did he say he’d call you again?”

“Yes! He asked if I wanted to get together again next weekend!”

“Well, then,” she said, sounding pleased. “If he said he was going to call, he’s definitely going to call.”

She worked for him, so she obviously knew him better than I did, and I liked the fact that she clearly believed he was a man of his word.

My college boyfriend, Mark, had not been so trustworthy. He’d said he loved me, but his actions had never matched up with his words.

He hid the fact that he was dating me, a Christian, from his Jewish mother for a whole year. He neglected to call me during college vacations when he was at home with her. He blew off my college graduation to attend a party his roommate was throwing. He told me about the way his mom would make fun of me whenever he brought me up, perhaps thinking I’d be amused. (Spoiler alert: I wasn’t.)

The final straw came when I found out Mark had lied to his mother about spending Christmas with me and my family in Toronto, telling her instead that he’d stayed in Boston by himself.

When I told my mom about it, she said, “Oh, Meghann. You don’t need a boy. You need a man.”

I broke up with him the next day.

In contrast, Paul called when he said he was going to call. We went out again, and then again, and then again.

By the time Christmas rolled around three and a half months after our first date, he’d cancelled his plane ticket home for the holidays so that we could drive up to Toronto together.

As we drove, Paul draped his baseball hat on my head to shield me from the sun and removed the cap from the water bottle before handing it to me when I needed a drink. Every time I stuck a new CD in the CD player, he knew exactly which Canadian rock band was playing. We switched off driving, and even when he wasn’t in the driver’s seat, he still insisted on paying all the tolls.

When we were about an hour outside Toronto, he looked at me and said, “We make a good team, don’t we?”

We didn’t spend Christmas Day together that year, but it was the last one we ever spent apart.

Find out what happened next by clicking here!