Friday is a really special day for our little family. It’s my husband and I’s tenth anniversary. Our marriage has lasted a decade, and while we treat every anniversary with the reverence it deserves (have you seen the divorce rate?), this big milestone is incredibly dear to us, especially since we started out as the most unlikely couple imaginable. At a time like this, it’s inevitable to take a trip down memory lane, starting with the first time I saw the guy who would later become my BFF, the father of my kids and, the killer of all the wayward bugs in my life.

My husband and I went to the same small college, and we were both residents of the honors’ co-ed dorm. Despite the familial environment of our tiny student body, we never really crossed paths during my first two years there.

One night, a group of my girlfriends pooled our miniscule funds in order to have a cocktail-infused get-together of epic proportions. We had just received our scholarship refund checks, we had no papers due, and we were ready to blow off some steam. Mostly, we were a group of girls sowing our oats in the safety of our dorm, surrounded by fellow students that had become like one giant extended family. Among the beer and homemade jello shots, we also ended up with these:

We found these Austin Powers-inspired cocktail mixers at the Wally World. These plastic shakers were a promotional item for the recent movie release, and we were always up for trying something completely ridiculous. All we needed to do was add the appropriate alcohol, and we’d have a neon-colored cocktail with a completely cheesy name.

So, we did. And that blue concoction tasted like a cross between drain cleaner and nuclear waste. Despite our best efforts, not one of my girlfriends could stomach it. Luckily for us, we had plenty of backup drinks, but the retched blue juice remained untouched. As the night wore on, we finally decided (with the kind of logic only college students possess) that we couldn’t let precious alcohol go to waste, so we began a door-to-door campaign around our dorm to see who was brave enough to choke it down. We were already three sheets to the wind, so this endeavor was a hilarious bumbling trek that was more laughter than anything else. Door to door we went, and every single one of our peers was so turned off by the smell of the noxious cocktail that they all refused even a taste-test.

That is, until we got to my husband’s door. After knocking (and giggling) quite loudly, the door was thrown open by one of the most imposing figures I had ever seen. He was wearing pajama pants, and a black bathrobe, and his long blond hair looked like a throwback to an 80’s hair band. But what struck me most of all, was his mean-face. The guy standing in front of me had the most mean expression I has ever seen, like we had just interrupted him from writing the great American novel or discovering the cure for cancer. In my mildly inebriated state, I explained to him the now famously intolerable blue cocktail, and how no one in the dorm could stomach a sip, let alone the whole shaker. As he looked at me with an expression of annoyance (perhaps tinged with a little contempt), my husband snatched the psychedelic cocktail shaker out of my hand, downed its’ putrid contents in three seconds, thrust the shaker back in my hands, and promptly closed the door in my face.

I turned to my closest girlfriend with pure astonishment (did he have a cast iron stomach, or what?), and said “holy crap, that guy’s an asshole.”

Little did I know that, within a few months, that scary-looking guy would sweep me off my feet in one fateful night…and I would never look back.