The thing about growing up in a small town is – it’s alot like a soap opera. Everyone knows everyone from birth or not much later and when it comes to dating and love, people are passed from relationship to relationship like the cup game. So the reality is, many young people from this small town want to leave in their adulthood simply to find love outside of all the people they know. They want to escape the soap opera of the town to find love in the big big world out there.
It can really go either way. Either you marry that one that you loved since you were 6 or you go out and find that soul mate who didn’t grow up in the same town you did.
I left. I needed to leave my small town. I had already stopped dating for a while in college. But it was still a place where we all knew each other and the soap opera was prevalent. I went out into the world thinking I would actually take a break from all the crazy dating game I had been seeing and “take a year off.” I moved to Pennsylvania to work at a school that presumably was staffed by married people and where there would be very little chance of me meeting anyone. I was wrong.
First day and Andy sat down my me. He asked me to dinner. We were never friends. We ARE best friends but maybe it was better that we never knew each other in childhood. Maybe the fact that we had both graduated from college before we even met is the reason we are able to have such a great marriage. There is no history or craziness to cloud our relationship. 
The thing is, I met the love of my life and it was IT! I knew I was ready for a real relationship because I had finally stopped looking for a relationship. I wasn’t needy, he wasn’t lonely. We were happy with ourselves and it made it easier to be happy together.
Now we are back in my small town and I’m teaching him about all the people I know and the past and everything but it’s just a story to him. It’s not his life. Our life now is his new small town living.
Life and Photos by Andy 