He used to leave flowers on my car. I would stumble outside in the morning, still waiting for my second cup of coffee to kick in, and find them on my windshield. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that I didn't know who left them at the time. There were a few different possibilities, really—I was in the middle of one involvement that had started out very simple and was fast becoming complicated, and another that was already complicated and was fast becoming positively gordian. I lived in a room off a house that belonged to a married couple, both of them political science professors; they were amiable, no-nonsense people whose toddler son used to stand on a bench and smile into my window. He would always nod when I asked if he wanted to help me write a paper on the Harlem Renaissance.

"How lovely that someone is leaving you flowers," said my landlady, only it was more of a question than a statement. I nodded and gave a bit of a shrug to let her know that she knew only slightly less than I knew. She shook her head with that amused look people get when they see others doing things they associate with foolhardiness and youth. It's often a knowing look.

I continued to dabble in the romantic arts. It was fun or difficult or euphoric or a mess, depending on when you asked me. Messes could last a very long time and get even messier than you thought they could: I had already learned that, but learning something and learning from it aren't always the same thing. There was a break, and in that break a boy who was a bit younger than I was. That was unusual for me. He was nice, his parents were nice, our nights out were nice, and the sex was nice. Everything was so nice that I don't think we even bothered to break up. I reverted to messiness, which brought an odd and temporary sort of relief after so much what-do-you-mean-"stop by the ocean"-it's-midnight-brand predictability.

Somewhere in there were some mediocre dates with random people whose names I don't remember and who made dinner seem interminable. I'm sure some of them were perfectly decent people. Still, the fact is that it often takes less than half an hour to determine there's absolutely no chance that anything remotely resembling either lust or love will blossom with a given decent person, and most dates last longer than half an hour. I might be criticized for lacking patience, but I just didn't see the point in going any further, and I must point out that I had a great deal of patience where both lust and love were involved, though it might not have looked much like patience. It might have looked more like a curiously long-lasting combination of masochism, recklessness, and militant optimism. But I'm not really one to guess how it might have looked; at the time, as you might imagine, I was occupied with other thoughts.

Yet a time came when I wasn't so occupied, and my housemates and I planned a cocktail party. We wore things like velvet and satin and stockings and heels. We lit candles, walked around holding pitchers of blue margaritas, mixed several drinks we had never heard of, and distributed cigarettes to the social smokers on the patio. Magdalena taught salsa in the living room. People who had decided to dispense with the whole cocktail charade by going to shots did so in the kitchen. I hear that one guest was rolling around in the back yard. Me, I ended up talking to a boy on the steps. He lived with a friend's boyfriend, and before, he had lived with a different friend (which is a story in itself). We had been running into each other or going out in small groups for over two years. He showed up in jeans and a leather jacket—he's never been one to dress up—and it was getting late when we found ourselves talking. Other people left, but he stayed. That was five years ago today. I didn't know he had been the one tucking carnations on my windshield two years earlier, but it made sense when he told me. I remembered how I was then and how he was then, and it made sense.

So today, I celebrate my five-year anniversary with my husband. He still shows up in jeans, and he can still make me feel like I'm waking up to flowers—and if you have ever seen me shortly after I've awakened, you will know that is indeed a remarkable feat.