"Love!? They don't know the first thing about love," Ira pronounces scornfully in the book Breathing Lessons.

He is responding to his wife's defense of their son's screwed up romantic involvement with the teenage mother of his child. Ira leaves his timid and baffled wife wondering, "What is the first thing about love?" Good question.

The love of my life, in its early stages, certainly looked less than promising.

We met as members of a theatre company during a training session in Los Angeles, California. I had been in a rehearsal until 4 am and was comatose on the floor of a classroom. I was rudely awakened at dawn to the sound of some completely insensitive, and apparently blind, idiot singing some Canadian folk song at the top of his lungs and strumming his guitar with great gusto.

I'm thinking, "Hello! Can this Canadian moron not see that I'm sleeping here?"

That was our first introduction. This was the man I would marry, and with whom I would create two more amazing little individuals. But that was much later. When I first met Calvin I was wearing a fairly large diamond ring from someone else. Someone different. Very different. Michael.

Michael was in med school at the time. When you look up "anal-retentive" in the dictionary that's his picture you'll see. I've always believed that a man's closet defines him. Michael's closet was a three-sided walk in affair. One side was all shirts, from his most casual t-shirt up to the most highly starched dress shirt, in order, on brown plastic hangers, one inch apart. One side was pants and one side was jackets. Shoes were on the floor in plastic boxes, labeled, and in order from athletic shoes up to dress shoes. I once left a wet towel on the floor at his apartment for a few minutes while I dried my hair. I never did it again.

I once helped him hang a Van Gogh print over his dresser. It took us an hour and half of measuring over and over with tape measures and a level and the need to rearrange the two items on the dresser sixty-four times to create the right visual picture. I'm actually surprised that Michael liked Van Goth, Vincent being such an artistically and emotionally messy guy.

Calvin's closet was, well, not even a closet. It was a suitcase--a suitcase from Goodwill with a broken handle being held on by duct tape. Inside the suitcase were holey underwear, a couple of t-shirts with the sleeves cut off and some bluegrass music slogans about pickin' and grinnin', and a brown double knit polyester suit also from Goodwill. His other possessions consisted of a fringy suede leather jacket, a sleeve garter off of which the fabric had disintegrated, a worn bible and his guitar named Spanky.

We were assigned to the same team with three other people and sent to tour the Midwest. Our team was led by a married couple and included another single woman, Gigi. Gigi promptly fell in love with Calvin, which was preferable to her falling in love with the other man on the team since he was married, but only slightly less complicated since Calvin promptly fell in love with me and I was in love with Michael. If we could've convinced Michael to fall in love with Gigi we would've had the perfect square. I'm sure Gigi would've been agreeable since she was pretty much game for anyone with testosterone and breath in his lungs, and the breath was optional.

When I remember that tour I often picture myself as Rose, in the movie Titanic, faced with the choice between the neurotic control freak and the free-spirited drifter. I would get off the phone after a late night argument with Michael and there would be Calvin, ready to listen and tell me I'm wonderful and oh, so misunderstood. There he would be charming everyone with his guitar, or running everywhere with the eagerness of a puppy, or dropping everything to skip rocks with a 5-year-old playmate. So I, like Rose, chose the free spirited drifter in the end.

It took three years during which I accepted to tour in Europe, running away from the whole confusing situation, but Calvin wrote to me every single day. Three hundred and sixty-five letters. We would arrive at our weekly mail drops and there would be a mound of letters, all for me. This did not make me particularly popular with the rest of my team, but it did win my heart. It also impressed my team leader, who pulled strings to have Calvin sent to Europe.

Touring together again, we ended up one afternoon on a mountaintop in Spain. We had crossed the border from France to renew our tourist visas. It was at that moment, gazing over this breathtaking expanse that we decided to stay together forever. He has since joked that he threatened to jump if I said no and I have since joked that he threatened to push me off if I said no, but in truth there were no threats involved. He was my very best friend, and my most adventurous playmate and I, like Rose, was swept away by his beautiful love of life.

I chose the man who never hesitates to cancel an important appointment in order to come home and give me a desperately needed break from the never-ending demands of my two toddlers.

He sends me off to Starbucks or Barnes & Noble for the evening while he whips up his specialty of french toast for the kids. He's the man who rubbed my feet every single night of my pregnancies. He's the man who still writes me love notes, and buys totally impractical presents, and makes such an embarrassing fuss over my little accomplishments. He could still care less about what he wears or making a lot of money, but he'll drop everything in a nanosecond to hunt bugs, swordfight or play chess with his son. He treats his daughter like a princess and her mother like a queen, and he fills our home with music.

Unlike Rose, my rambling, gambling drifter didn't die after a single night of passion in the backseat of a car on a ship. He lived, and we've now been married for eighteen years. Long enough for that lack of tidiness and fashion sense to become annoying, for worries about health insurance and mortgages to overshadow the appeal of a free spirit and for passion to fizzle.

The "first thing" about love has long disappeared, but I'm thinking it's the fourth, fifth, twelfth or hundred-and-twentieth things about love that really matter. Those things that keep us believing there is something and someone bigger than our challenges, that there are new things to discover after all this time, that there are more adventures to face together, and that there is always plenty to laugh about.