This year my wife and I will celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. That feels like a major milestone, though the years have slipped easily by. This was not the first marriage for either of us, so we know just how difficult staying married can be. Especially if you start that relationship on a blind date.

Blind dates require an exceptional amount of trust and faith from the participating parties. If male, you trust that your date won’t turn out to be a soup-slurping harpy, and she must believe that you’re not the next Boston Strangler.

My first blind date occurred in college. My roommate had a steady girlfriend; I was still shopping around. Being uncommitted, I was fair game for my roommate. His girlfriend had a girlfriend – you know the story. I agreed to a movie date with the four of us. It turned out to be “Papillon,” about a French convict who escapes the Devil’s Island penal colony, starring Steve McQueen.

First off, your first date, blind or otherwise, should never be a movie. You sit in the dark for two hours, not saying a word to each other. You leave the theater no less strangers than when you entered. In the middle of “Papillon,” having no idea who this person sitting next to me was, there’s a startling scene when a cast of crabs (no movie pun – the collective noun for a bunch of crabs really is “a cast”) come scrabbling out of the mud. My date, apparently moved to comment, jumps up from her seat, points at the screen and shouts, “What is them things?!”

Over the catcalls from the irritated audience, I swear I hear my roommate giggle. This is where trust crumbles and friendship goes up in smoke. That conniving little rat, I think. He set me up, in more ways than one. I decide to kill him. Slowly, painfully, in his sleep. Suffice to say, the evening was not a success.

Cut to blind date number two. Once again, mutual friends set the stage. But now I’m older and wiser. I won’t be fooled – or embarrassed – again. When we finally connect, after a recorded phone message on my part, we agree to meet for a casual dinner. Crab may be on the menu, but it damn well won’t be on the screen.

When I spot her in the restaurant, and our eyes meet, we can see the relief on each other’s face. Not that looks are everything (relationships, I believe, are mostly about chemistry), but it certainly helped that she was lovely, and I was, well, not ugly. We had a pleasant dinner, talking and getting to know one other. There was chemistry.

We married a year later in a tiny chapel walking distance from our house.

For our 15th anniversary, we wrote each other sonnets. This year – celebrating our silver anniversary – I gave my wife a novella. (As my love has grown, so has my writing!) Sometimes blind dates do have happy endings.

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