Today is the 25th anniversary of the first time I laid eyes on my wife, Diane.

We met at a Valentine’s Day party that I threw with several single friends, all in our twenties. Diane came to the “Passion Bash,” as we optimistically named it, as the guest of one of my best buddies from college, who was crashing that weekend on my couch (or, more accurately, on one axis of my “conversation pit.”) But then she and I danced together. And their date, and everything else that came before it in both of our romantic lives, was history.

It took a while to tie up all the loose ends of our social lives, but we both knew right away this was going to be it. I never met anyone so beautiful and smolderingly sexy, yet so loving and lovable (which are not the same thing); so smart, talented and focused, yet willing to draw another into her artistic and intellectual passions. We love a lot of the same movies and music, and when we disagree, the discussions are epic and fascinating.

Diane also has a great giggle.

I waited until the next Valentine’s Day to propose only because it seemed like nice romantic symmetry, popping the question in front of the building we had rented out for the Passion Bash. That night it was being used for a concert of Ukrainian string music. So, on bent and shivering knee (it was about eight degrees outside) and with the sound of a balalaika quartet in the background, I asked Diane the question we had both known the answer to for so long.

Back in the car, I put on a mix-tape I had prepared: every version I could find of “My Funny Valentine” and “My Foolish Heart.” We sat for a long time listening to it and making out.

Twenty-five years later, we both still tell this story as if it happened just a few weeks ago. And we tell the story more than I ever would have predicted, because people often ask us how we hooked up. They ask because we seem like a couple who never really got over the astonishment of falling in love at first sight, but also because we are pretty open about how hard we work on our relationship–no matter how hard our relationship has worked on us.

We have survived professional setbacks in our lives as writers and teachers, and we’ve even survived professional successes, which can be as threatening to a marriage as setbacks. We have survived the stunning early death of a parent. We have survived medical catastrophes. And we remain, in sickness and in health, in love.

When I listen to that mix-tape I made over two decades years ago, it turned out to be a prescient soundtrack for the life we made for ourselves. The renditions of those two songs were remarkably diverse, everything from Mel Torme and Sarah Vaughan to Elvis Costello and Rickie Lee Jones. And some aren’t really romantic at all. They’re dark, mysterious, challenging.

Together, however, these tracks reinforce what I have come to understand about being and staying in love: A great marriage is a song both brilliant and resilient, one that can be performed over and over, with different nuances being discovered, or rediscovered, on every take.

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