hands, while signing marriage register, Capetown, South AfricaOfer and I "met" in 1991 when I was doing a teen program in Israel. The last 3 months of it was an army course called Ma'rva. Ofer was one of the commanders on the course. He was 20, and I was 18. After the course I left to go back to South Africa and kept in contact with some of the Israeli commanders that I met, but not Ofer. We were never even friends.
16 years later, I got a message on facebook from him - he just wanted to say hi and catch up. To be completely honest, I wasn't sure who he was as I didn't ever know his last name, and the picture wasn't very clear. I replied to him honestly, and asked him if he was the Ofer from the army. He replied that he was and we started chatting....quite a bit, in fact. He started calling me in South Africa and we just got along really well. We got into a quick habit of speaking to each other over skype, msn and phone for at LEAST 6 hours a day! My friends were amazed, and wanted to know what we could possibly be talking about.
4 days into our chatting, Ofer announced that he was booking his ticket to Cape Town - I nearly fell over. I was freaking out, thinking, what is this guy up to!?!? My friend Robyn even mailed a mutual friend of ours and Ofer's in Israel to ask if he could be trusted! I had a good feeling about it, but Ofer must have had some kind of gut feeling that this was going to work. In the two months that followed, we spoke every day for hours on end and fell in love without even meeting in person.
Many people were happy and excited; others skeptical. I myself, who had been single for over 5 years, happy, set in my ways, was extremely cynical about true love, quite content to be on my own forever and very specific in what I was looking for in a man - I came to believe that this person did not exist.
On 21 December 2007 Ofer landed in Cape Town. I fetched him from the airport, nervous as all hell, and took him to his hotel. But from the moment we "re-met", we just clicked.....and we were engaged 26 days later (to be precise)! We travelled back and forth to Israel and South Africa, and are now both living in Manchester, UK, about to celebrate our first wedding anniversary on 1 September.
Sometimes it just fits, so why not take the chance!
Leanne and Ofer's heart would love for others to contribute to the Sir Bobby Robson Foundation for cancer research http://www.sirbobbyrobsonfoundation.org.uk/
