Welcome to the Money or Love “Tell Me Your Love Story” Voting!
Thank you for helping to select the winner of our contest. The process is easy:

Read/watch the three stories below.

Click on the link at the bottom of the page.

Vote.

That’s it. The winner will be announced on September 12th.

Everyone who votes will be entered to win a signed copy of Money or Love. Winner to be notified on September 12th.

Thanks to all who shared their heartfelt love stories. Each one was uniquely special.

Enjoy!

Money or Love, “Tell Me Your Love Story” Entry #1
Marlene: “The One”

It was my cousin Ann’s 19th birthday, and the whole family was together at her house. As was typical, Ann and I decided to leave, she wanted to rent tandem bikes. Her boyfriend Larry was at the gathering, but I was alone. Ann decided to call Michael Sullivan as he enjoyed outdoor activities.

Michael came into my aunt’s house with hair to the middle of his back, driving a van with a mattress inside. My parents were thrilled of course.

Off we went to Elliott Creek Park. I went home that night and told my friend Patti “I met the one”. She told me I was crazy.

Three years later Michael and I were married, Ann and Patti stood up for me. We’ve been married 47 years. We have two children and 4 grandchildren and had good times and bad times. Through it all we are still best friends and wouldn’t have it any other way.

Money or Love, “Tell Me Your Love Story” Entry #2
Joyce: “A Love Lost and Found”

Familiar as a summer sky, draped over a gentle wave, her sea-blue eyes mirrored mine, and I knew instantly.  This woman was the long-lost love of my life.  My sister, after 58 years, was finally “home.”

Christina, or Tracy as my other siblings and I knew her, was never a secret.  As soon as each of us was conscious of knowing, Mom confessed her greatest regret:  Christina was given up for adoption at birth. My two brothers, two other sisters and I all knew the tortured story well.  

Our mother, a woman of immense love, but of little restraint or discretion, gave birth to seven children, by four different men.  Somewhere in the middle was the union with Christina’s and my father, the quintessential charming Irishman with fantastic stories you desperately wanted to believe and those sea-blue eyes that made you not care if they weren’t.  

There was another family Dad neglected to mention in his stories as he wooed our mother.  On her own, already with one child born out of wedlock, our mother was easy prey, but their love story was real.  Until it wasn’t.  After I was born, came a baby boy, our brother, Tommy.  The love story began to die when Tommy did, from SIDs when he was barely three-weeks old.

Totally bereft, Mom was now left to care for two children born out of wedlock – my older brother, Mark, and I – with few resources other than my father’s support.  Then, even that ended, thanks to an understandably scorned, estranged wife and a legal system in her favor.  

Mom discovered she was pregnant again, this time with Christina. Now with no resources and no options, baby “Tracy Bryan,” as it read on her birth certificate, would be carried away from the delivery room without Mom ever seeing her daughter’s face. “I can still remember,” Mom would recount through tears every year on “Tracy’s” birthday.  “All I saw was the shock of black hair on the back of her head as the nurse carried her down the hall.”

Knowing what it cost her, and how deeply she believed “Tracy” was better off not having her life interrupted by Mom’s chaos (which, indeed, continued), my siblings and I honored Mom’s wish not to look for our sister. But when Mom died in 2014, we knew we had to find our sister, our long-lost love, the missing piece of all of our hearts.  

Thanks to genealogy sites and to kismet (thank you common Facebook friend, Christina Abt!), last year, 58 years after she was born, I met my sister on her doorstep in Boston, New York.  It turns out, Christina was with us all along.

Money or Love, “Tell Me Your Love Story” Entry #3
Mary: “Good Night Little Girl”