Real-Life Romance: Overcoming First Impressions

Have you ever decided you didn't want to get to know someone better because of a first impression? Sometimes, when you finally do, you realize that person is the best friend--or even boyfriend--you've ever had. Today, Molly Noble Bull is joining us to tell about her first impressions of her husband ... and the fun way she overcame them.

​    Charlie and I have been married for many years. Yet I will always remember how it all began.
   We met in college, and I was impressed by the fact that he was the president of a popular student organization I knew. But I was eighteen. He seemed much older, older than the college boys I knew.
    It wasn’t that he looked older, but there was a maturity about him I couldn’t ignore. Though he was kind, polite, and handsome, I thought he was probably a veteran. Since I wasn’t interested in dating older guys, I didn’t consider him a possible boyfriend.
   Still, he seemed interested in me.
   Why?
   I not only looked young for my age, about fifteen, I was probably one of the least mature freshmen on campus. But one of my friends had a mad crush on Charlie Bull. She talked about him all the time. The more she talked, the better he sounded. 

   Okay, I was eighteen, and he was probably about twenty-four, making him six years older. So what? My father was eight years older than my mother.
   One day I was seated alone at a table in the student union building when he came over and started talking to me. I invited him to sit down. Out of the blue, he asked me for a date on Friday night.
   It took him a long time to ask me out. I wanted to go out with him, and somehow, I knew if I turned him down, he would never ask me out again. Trouble was, I already had a date for Friday night.
   So, I said, “I have a date on Friday night, but I don’t have a date on Saturday night.”
   He smiled. “Then I guess I’ll see you on Saturday night.”
   We went out on that Saturday night. Neither of us dated anyone else after our first date, and we married a year later. But on that special first date, I learned some important facts about Charlie.
   He was mature, all right, but wasn’t a veteran. He wasn’t years old than me either. In fact, he was only one grade ahead of me in school.
   After we married, he entered the United States Army. At the end of his term of duty, he became a veteran—finally.
   Children, home, family. A lot of exciting things happened after our first date. But that’s another story.

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Molly Noble Bull has published with Zondervan, Love Inspired, Barbour Publishing, and others. Sanctuary, her long historical, won the 2008 Gayle Wilson Award in the inspirational category and tied for first place in a second national contest for published authors that year. Later, the publisher went out of business, and Hartline Literary published Sanctuary under a new title, The Secret Place.
Molly’s Gothic historical, Gatehaven, won the Grand Prize in the 2013 Creation House Fiction Writing Contest. When the Cowboy Rides Away won the 2016 Texas Association of Authors contest in the Christian western category. Barbour Publishing published The Secret Admirer Romance Collection on May 1, 2017, and Molly’s novella in that collection is titled “Too Many Secrets.” Cinderella Texas and The Secret Place were published by Hartline’s White Glove Publishing.
Visit www.mollynoblebull.com to learn more.

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Gina Hollister, a dyslexic with a PhD in educational psychology, is hired by widower and business tycoon, Steve Bryson, to tutor his fourteen-year-old daughter for the summer at his Durango, Colorado, mansion that Gina calls a castle.

An attraction soon develops between Gina and Steve. However, their romance can never end in marriage because Gina believes the lies about Steve’s womanizing, and he claims he’ll never marry again–even to a beautiful Bible Thumper like Dr. Gina Hollister.

​Find out more here.

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