Anyone who loves romance – either writing it or reading it – will be familiar with tropes. These are the rhetorical devices that frame the story of how couples end of falling in love against the odds. But real life can be stranger than fiction and there are lots of true stories about the weird and wonderful ways that people end up finding their soul mate – everything from being reunited with the lost love they first held hands with at nursery school, to a lonely widow and widower being set up by their funeral director. It’s all out there! So to celebrate friend of the blog, Sophie Childs, fabulous new novel, We Just Clicked, the Write Romantics had a little chat about our own unusual love stories.
Helen P
Sometimes it feels like my husband, Steve, and I have been together forever… However, I guess you could call our 
meeting unusual, as we met when I was on a night out with my friends. It was fancy dress and I was dressed as if I’d been in an accident, on crutches, and covered head to foot with bandages and fake blood. Not exactly the stuff of romantic novels, I suppose, but it worked for us!
Lynne
I met my husband, Andy, speed dating at a Christian hippy festival… there’s definitely a novel in there somewhere! But the best true story I ever read was in the ‘Letters from an Extreme Pilgrim’ book by the vicar, Peter Owen Jones. In the book Peter and a friend were working in an advertising agency and he was in a lift and met a young woman he liked. He was spoken for himself, but knew this person was just right for his friend. He came back and told his friend ‘I’ve just met the woman you’re going to marry!’ and he did!
Jessica
I met my husband, Mark, online. He’d been online dating on and off for a couple of years but I’d just put my profile on 
having moved to a new area where I didn’t know anyone and having opened a teddy bear shop where any male customers were likely to be buying for their girlfriend/wife/kids. I registered on the Sunday, Mark contacted me on the Monday, and we met on the Wednesday. Inspired by my success, my older brother, Mike, registered on the same dating site and met his wife, Sue. What’s spooky about their story is that they’d actually met when they were young kids. My parents didn’t know Sue’s parents, but they had a mutual friend and were both at the mutual friend’s daughter’s birthday when she was about 4 or 5. There’s photographic evidence! This inspired part of the story in Searching for Steven, which those of you who have read it will definitely recognise.
My mum also knew she was going to marry my dad after their first date, and went home and told her dad that. She’d actually seen him on TV. He’d been a contestant on the gameshow ‘Double Your Money’ in the 60s and my mum remembered this lad on there from Bishop Auckland, then she met him at work and recognised him from that!
Jo
As for me? The first time I met my husband, he’d just had back surgery and he asked me to crawl into his under-stairs
cupboard and get him some essential household items he couldn’t access. No wonder I’m a romance writer, when real life is like that… Still, it could have been worse, I could still be locked in there and, if I’d read any of Helen Phifer’s books at that stage in my life, I’d never have gone in, in the first place!
If you enjoyed reading about how some of us found love, we think you’ll love Sophie’s book. We Just Clicked tells the story of how Erin finds love, despite serious doubts that these things ever happen in real life.
Erin’s life isn’t what you’d call glamorous. She works in admin, has a crotchety boss whose morning coffee she has to fetch, as well as a mother who thinks nothing of breaking the law or the mother/daughter code of acceptable levels of embarrassment.
There are good things in Erin’s life, too, like best friend Bex, and most of all her hot fiancé Ty. But just when she should be finalising wedding plans, Ty announces some big plans of his own which are set to change Erin’s life forever. A newly single Erin, encouraged by Bex and hoping to avoid her mum’s matchmaking attempts, dives right into the world of online dating.
Can you find your Prince Charming at the first click? Well, maybe some lucky people do, but not our Erin! Instead she takes the reader with her on a roller coaster ride of dodgy first dates until it seems she might finally have found her Mr Right.
We laughed with Erin and felt her pain, not just when she was unlucky in love but also when she received some unexpected news about someone she loved, but had taken for granted, which most of us can empathise with. Of course the path of true love didn’t run smooth – this is a romance novel after all – but in the end Erin and the reader get the ending they deserve. Laughter, tears and a big fat dollop of romance… What more could any girl want?
We Just Clicked is available from Amazon for just 99p for this week only.
We’d love to hear your stories of falling in love in unusual ways and, in the meantime, happy reading.
Jo xx
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