Adult Views

Sven looked down at the small velvet box in his hand. Trying to stifle his nerves, he opened it and looked, yet again, at the ring. He had never envisioned himself as the marrying type but, from the day he met Myrtle, he knew she was someone special.

Growing up, Sven had not been popular. He was shy, quiet, didn’t like sports and preferred to lose himself in a book. The other guys easily ignored him and he was certainly not confident to approach any of the girls. His teachers and other adults praised him for his intelligence and maturity but that did nothing to endear him to people of his own age.

As an adult, Sven had lost a lot of his shyness but he still didn’t have much self-esteem. That was initially why he had turned to online dating as a way to meet new people. It was much easier to approach a woman on the internet. Sven reasoned that, if she was signed up for online dating, then she was expecting to be approached by men of all types.

Sven had met many really nice women – and, admittedly, a few witches that had stripped layers from his self-confidence. Then, he met Myrtle. She had been the one to approach him and he had been so pleased. She was sweet and kind and she seemed almost out of her element on an online dating site. Myrtle had explained that she was painfully shy and the online world was her great equalizer. Sven felt like he’d met a part of himself.

After letting their relationship grow slowly through the internet, Sven and Myrtle finally met in person. Divested of all their insecurities, their first embrace had been incredibly passionate. Myrtle, as it turned out, was beautiful and Sven found himself questioning the source of her shyness. He couldn’t imagine any man not being attracted to her. He felt like the luckiest man on earth to have her in his life and he was going to see to it that she never slipped away.

Sven treated Myrtle with all the love and respect he had inside. He would do anything to make her happy and she asked for so little. She made it incredibly easy to love her – and love her he did, with all his heart. Never could he have imagined that taking a chance on online dating would lead to this moment. Sven waited nervously at their favourite spot in the park. He saw her approaching from a distance and removed the small box from his pocket. In his head, he ran through the words of his proposal one last time and, when she was close enough that he could see her smile, he suddenly had all the confidence in the world. It was perhaps the greatest gift she had ever given him.