Look at these kids. Look at how sweet they look with their crazy hair. Heck, just look at how young they are and ignore the crazy hair.

Oy. the hair…

They just met last week, or maybe two weeks before that. They’ve already fallen head-over-heels in love with each other. That happened the day they met. In fact she’s just decided to move to Boston to be with him.

Just look at how relaxed and happy they are in that photo. They don’t know anything about what the future holds for them. They have no idea that in a year they’ll be living in Paris, that at the end of that year two planes will fly into the Twin Towers and change the world forever. They don’t know that they will come home to a changed country with no jobs waiting for them. They’ll spend a year temping and trying to find work before giving up on their respective career aspirations and moving on to other things.

Those two kids don’t know that three years after this photo is taken they’ll be married on a hot, hot August day (ten years ago this Sunday) at the top of a mountain overlooking the Bay Area. She can’t even fathom what that might look like; she’s never even been to California. Little does she know that one day she’ll call it home.

They also don’t know that three years after the wedding they’ll have a baby girl and two years after that they’ll have another. Or that by then she’ll have finally figured out what she wants to do with her life or that he’ll be a successful attorney.

Nor do they know that along the way they’ll face hardships they can’t even conceive of. Autoimmune disorders at the top of a long list of more run-of-the-mill challenges.

Most astounding in hindsight is that they don’t know that through all those things they’ll never fall out of love. Instead they’ll grow more fond of each other as each year waxes and wanes and what, on that day, feels like infatuation will grow into a deep, true love that binds them tightly together, making them an invincible team tough enough to weather any of those storms that come their way. It seems crazy that they wouldn’t know this, that they wouldn’t have divined it.

But no, right now they know none of this. They’re just feeling goofy. Their friends are about to break out a bottle of Bailey’s to see how it tastes mixed with Frosties (the cereal, not the frozen treat, though at some point in the evening ice cream will make its way into the mix). Right now, as that photo is being taken, they’re just two kids who thought they were going to have a one-night stand and haven’t yet realized that instead they lucked out by finding the most amazing teammate and life partner they could have ever imagined.