You don’t often hear that someone’s first love also turns out to be the great love. But it does exist, Noëlle Palmen (30) from Oosterhout knows, because she has been together with her first and great love Wesley (32) for ten years now. The ‘first love’ is the theme of the Book Week that starts today.
It is a beautiful story, the budding love between Noëlle and Oosterhoutse Wesley, who still lived in Rotterdam. She talks about it as if it were yesterday.
“We met ten years ago through a dating site. Super exciting! My parents knew nothing about it and I was very insecure at the time. Getting up to a boy in a bar was really a bridge too far for me, I didn’t dare. Online dating was better for me,” says Noëlle.
You can say that, because within two days there was a match. With, you guessed it, Wesley. Noëlle: “We immediately clicked while chatting and after a few weeks of texting, we made an appointment at La Place in Rotterdam. I got off the tram and it was buzzing, but we found each other within seconds. “You were immediately mine,” Wesley later said of that moment.”
But he handled it carefully with the then still insecure Noëlle. A second date followed, in The Hague. “That’s when I got real jitters for the first time. We had such a good time together. While walking, Wesley took my hand and bam!, that physical contact made the spark fly. After our first kiss, when we said goodbye, we were sold and we knew: this is not just something, this is serious”.
After months of traveling back and forth between Oosterhout and Rotterdam, Wesley and Noëlle only wanted one thing: to be together. Noëlle looked for and found work as a pedagogical employee in Oosterhout, packed her things and moved to Brabant. “It took some getting used to, but we really wanted to live together and were so happy, it doesn’t really matter where you live,” says Noëlle.
On March 10, 2019, Wesley and Noëlle’s love was crowned with the birth of their daughter Tessa. “The birth of Tessa has brought us even closer together. I can only say that we are happier than ever. Really, the twenty euros for that dating site ten years ago is my best twenty euros ever spent!”
In October, Wesley and Noëlle have been together for ten years, five of which have been married. What is their secret? “Hmm, that’s a good question. I think we leave each other very free. We have our own hobbies and do not need to be together 24 hours a day. We trust each other. Freedom and trust, I think that is the basis for a happy relationship, says Noëlle.”