Mark and I celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary this month, which followed the 14th anniversary of our meeting by about five weeks. Although I can recall both days as if they happened only a month or so ago, I am well aware that there's been no shortage of water under this old bridge of mine since those stirringly romantic moments changed my life for the better and forever.

Falling in love was an easy, natural process for us, and it truly seemed the only possible and reasonable thing to do at the time. From the first minute we shared company there was a familiar feeling, a recognition, a fitting ... a knowledge that something we didn't realize was missing had been found and replaced and we were suddenly whole.

We both came with history, as adults always do, and ours served to make even clearer that what we had together was special and different from what had come before.

It did take us both a while to trust these feelings. For my part, I had spent my life assuming that couples who touted total trust, dedicated friendship, categorical acceptance, confident companionship, complete communication and the like were either lying or fooling themselves. I had never seen a relationship that worked that way, and I doubted the possibility one could even exist.

I had also never known a truly honest and honorable man, aside from perhaps my father, so found myself waiting for feet of clay to show themselves, for cracks to appear in what would surely prove to be a facade, for Mr. Right to morph into Mr. Just-like-the-rest-of-them.

He was much younger and less wounded by love-gone-wrong, but had seen enough holiday romances to hold some skepticism over the potential for longevity of ours.

Our doubts, however, worked in our favor. If we'd known from Day One that this love of ours was to be THE love of our lives we might not have had as much fun as we had at the beginning. And, oh!, we did have so much fun.

All these years later, we still laugh a lot more than we squabble ... other things have slowed down a bit, though, but that may have as much to do with having two little kids as anything.

The photo was taken in San Francisco in January of 1994. I had just completed a year-long trip around the world, more than three months of which had been spent falling in love with Mark in Seychelles. He was waiting for me at the airport in San Francisco when I returned and we spent 10 days together before he went back to England.

I was 42 at the time. He was 27.