Love has no rules, or labels, and it doesn’t care about gender, age, or race. But, unfortunately, interracial dating hasn’t always been accepted by everyone.
In the early 70s, a young woman named Jeanne was a freshman at Loyola University Chicago. She was studying to be a nurse, and she was also a member of the German Club.
That’s where she met Steve Watt, a senior. The two were getting along really well, and they eventually fell in love.
“He was handsome, extremely intelligent, witty & quite charming with a killer smile,” says Jeanne on her GoFundMe page.
But things didn’t go as they wished.
Sadly, Jeanne’s family disapproved of their relationship, and the young woman started feeling the pressure building up inside her.
“I graduated in 1975 & proceeded to enter nursing school. Steve was pursuing a master’s degree in education. Time constraints & distance kept us apart [and] stressors began to build for me & I took a full time evening position at a local hospital,” she explains.
Feeling overwhelmed, Jeanne decided to break up with Steve, and she did it by phone. In fact, this is something she regretted right when she hung up, but it was all over by then.
They both went on with their lives, marrying other people and getting divorced.
More than forty years later, Jeanne decided to search for Steve on social media, hoping that she would find him and have the chance to apologize.
“Forty two years later, retired, with a computer & nothing but time on my hands, could I find him? Could I apologize? Could we be friends?” she wondered.
She kept searching on and off for seven months with no luck, but she finally found his niece, who told her that he had been living in a nursing home.
Jeanne sent him a letter, but when she realized she would not be able to communicate with him otherwise, she decided to visit him in person.
She took the plane from Oregon to Chicago, hoping to meet him.
At the nursing home, she had to narrate their story to the Director of Social Services, who, after learning of their story, decided to bring Steve to Jeanne herself. As she said, this was the first time Steve had received visitors in ten years.
Although Steve looked like “a broken man”, he still remembered her nickname, and when he called her by it, it felt like all those years they had been apart melted away.
The two spent time together laughing and crying, and holding hands. That’s when they realized that they could not be separated again.
Jeanne arranged things so that she could take Steve home and care for him just like a devoted partner would do.
Her brother helped her, as did strangers who donated money to their GoFundMe page, so that Jeanne could pay for the equipment needed to take care of Steve, given his condition.
Today, Steve and Jeanne are trying to make up for the lost time, knowing that they were meant to be together.
Below, you can watch Jeanne and Steve sharing their love story in a video that will make you tear up.
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