Quinn had thought she knew what true love was three times before. First, when she was 15, she had fallen in love with Scott Jankowski, another sophomore at Mercy High School, the Catholic High School in her hometown of Port Charles. It seemed they were destined to be together forever. Her parents had met when they were both juniors at the same high school. So it was perfectly logical.
The teachers at Mercy High School loved to assign volunteer work as a way to get the students involved in the community. Sometimes it would come from the civics teacher, sometimes it had come from the religion teacher, or at other times, it came from whatever teacher was running the boosters club or the cheerleading squad (to which Quinn had belonged).
So an experience volunteering at Mercy hospital as a candy striper had inspired her with her goal in life, to become a nurse.
"You are smart, and you could get into medical school," her godfather, Joe Quinn, started saying things like this from around the time her ambition first got around in her family. "You'll be taking orders from doctors and you'll realize you could be doing that."
"I've seen them, and they don't take care of patients," she always argued. "They hardly spend any time with them."
"Teenagers always want to 'help people'" when they grow up," her father had smiled as he explained to Joe Quinn.
"What's wrong with that?" his daughter asked him.
"Nothing at all," her mother chimed in. Kathleen was a grade school teacher at Port Charles Middle School.
Scott thought it was a great idea. He intended to be a cop. They were both accepted at Port Charles University, which was pretty much to be expected of any literate high school graduate from the area. Both applied to other colleges, since parents who have saved up anything for college for their offspring have an ambition to see them go to an institution other than that "glorified high school."
So when Quinn got accepted at Notre Dame, which surprised her, she knew she had to go, or she would never hear the end of it from her grandparents, her uncles and aunts, and her numerous cousins.
Scott went to Cornell after all, since he had been accepted there. But this kind of separation is nothing when it comes to true love. Her grandfathers were both factory workers, and so were proud of Dan and Kathleen for graduating from the glorified high school and becoming white collar, middle class citizens. But naturally the next generation must make a step up. Scott's family was more or less the same.
They assured each other they would write and that they would see each other on every possible weekend. Indeed, Scott came to Notre Dame on Homecoming Weekend, and Quinn went to Ithaca one weekend in October. He met her new friends, and she met his new friends, and everything seemed fine. They saw each other on Fall Break and on Christmas Break and on two other weekends at home.
Then in the Spring semester, Quinn started to feel differently about her friend Sean Monroe, who she'd always talked to and told about how she missed Scott. He'd always told her about his girlfriend, Lynn. Quinn felt like she knew Lynn and even met her on a couple of Lynn's weekend visits. Sean had met Scott, and Sean liked Scott a whole lot.
Sean had gone home to Kentucky every possible weekend to see Lynn, but in the Spring semester, he didn't seem to go. Quinn had too much studying to do, or something else to do, and never did make it home as many times as she had intended. At first, she figured that a person is always tempted by someone else - she'd heard stories about even married women who fantasized about someone else. But true love, well, that means you don't really want to be with this other man. It's just a part of life that maturity helps you deal with. Indeed, one of her uncle's wives had even gotten involved with another man. But in the end it all smoothed out.
But Quinn and Scott weren't even married, and Scott must have gotten really busy too, because she didn't hear from him as much.
By the end of her freshman year, Quinn was convinced that when you are in high school, you are, these days at least, just too young to get the concept of true love. She and Sean were sure they were in love. In college, you are away from your family and you really grow up. So you have a much better idea of what true love is.
Sean was a junior, and he was so much more mature than Scott. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. Scott had wanted to be a cop, but now he was trying for a degree in business administration. Sean was going to go to law school.
So when Quinn was a junior herself, and then a senior, she spent a lot of weekends at the University of Kentucky Law School. She spent others with Sean and his family in Kentucky. She really liked his parents, and she loved Kentucky, and she thought she would really love to live there. She got along well with his sister. She and Sean ran into Lynn at church once, and Lynn and her new husband were positively civil.
Sean liked Port Charles, when he went there with Quinn to meet her family. He liked them all. Her parents were impressed with him, if a little shy at first. Everybody liked Sean's southern drawl, and Joe Quinn even imitated it for Quinn once on the phone. He called her at least once a month. Once, at the Port Charles Grill, during a visit during a summer break from Sean's clerking job in Louisville and Quinn's break from a stint volunteering at Louisville General Hospital, Quinn and Sean ran into Scott and a girl named Cheryl Shue. Cheryl was a model for a local agency, and apparently Scott was dating her. She stood up and shook hands with Quinn.
When they got back to the house, Sean told Joe all about how Cheryl had towered over Quinn. This was ever so slightly annoying. She had to hear again her aunts' opinion about how she could have been a model but for her height. "She is so beautiful, but so short," they'd say.
This time, Sean proved to be her hero. "I love them petite," he said. He was six feet and three inches tall, and the tall girlfriends she had at Notre Dame and at the University of Kentucky loved to tease her that she was wasting one of the few tall guys. "Any guy is taller than you, so why do you take a tall one and leave me the ones that I can look down at the top of his head standing next to?" teased one, or "you'll never know what that feels like, unless you date a midget" kidded another, or "girls like you make it impossible for me to wear high heels," would be another one of the jokes Quinn had laughed at many a time.
One summer she had even worked at Port Charles General Hospital. She flew to Kentucky a few times that summer, and Sean flew to Port Charles a couple of times. Sean was at her graduation. By that time, she had an offer to work at PCGH, and was really excited. Sean didn't want her to take it. It was easy for an R.N. to get a job anywhere, and he was sure his "little nurse" could land one at Louisville General.
But the temptation proved to be too much for Quinn. Having a job in her hometown and being near her family sounded wonderful. Somehow it would all work out. Sean could easily take the New York bar exam as well as the Kentucky bar exam.
Then one romantic evening before she started her job, at the horse races in Kentucky, Sean proposed. And it suddenly occurred to Quinn she had just been drifting along, and that true love couldn't possibly exist after all when you were just in college. She and Sean had a lot of fun in their time, but then, she was too happy about being a nurse in Port Charles. How could she not want to go and work in Louisville? True love would have meant that would have been what she would have preferred. She hedged, and said that maybe they should see what happened if they were separated. She remembered Scott, and reminded him of Lynn, and thought they must need a test of separation to see if they still wanted to stay together.
Her parents were amazingly supportive of this attitude. She didn't know whether they weren't so crazy about Sean, or just wanted her living in Port Charles. Joe Quinn, as usual, did not mince words and said he was glad for both reasons. Everybody else just said, "follow your heart."
Sean was rather angry, and wouldn't speak to her, so rather than see if they would last through a mere geographical separation, they broke up completely. Quinn was a little angry too, about Sean's either/or ultimatum about the whole thing.
In her first year she worked in maternity and then in intensive care. She started dating for what felt like the first time in her life. She went out once with a guy named Jasper Jax, who was a really high roller a lot older than she, and this one evening opened up her eyes to how much there was in the world that she didn't know about. He had his own jet, and he flew her to the Poconos to see the stock car races, and they had a really fancy dinner there and flew back, all in one evening. Quinn and her friends discussed this date for about two weeks. They were all wild about his accent, how good looking he was, and how rich he was. But as to who he was himself they never wondered.
Most of the doctors flirted with her. The son of the chief of staff wasn't a doctor, but he flirted with her whenever he came in. "You should marry him," said Joanna Shields, another one of the nurses. "You could be Quinn Quartermaine."
"That's a great foundation for a marriage," commented Dr. Jones, who was looking at a chart nearby.
"It might be as good as any other that seems to be," Quinn said, with a little irony.
Quinn went out with Dr. Paul Whitman spontaneously after they got into a conversation at the nurse's station. They went to Kelly's and had a cup of coffee, and then went to Jake's and played pool, and had a few drinks, and talked long into the night. He was fascinated with the races, which Quinn knew all about, since her father and her godfather had a major hobby in them. They even had cars at the race track and drove themselves, but they never won anything. It was mostly for fun.
That year, Dan and Joe got Quinn to drive Joe's car - he said he was getting too old, and that there weren't enough women driving. She loved the feeling of speed and power, and once made it through a time trial and raced the Port Charles 100, and came in 59th.
Paul was really impressed. He bought himself a car, and Dan and Joe got really into helping him.
Paul was only about 5'8" tall, and therefore a natural. Between the hospital and the race track and about six more evenings out on the town, Quinn was sure she had found the real true love that you find in the real world when you are grown up and out of school.