This is Josh Tate. This is my husband.

I first met Josh at Camp Maranatha, at the round staff table. He was sitting with a bunch of the other staff boys, and I don't remember him from any other boy there, not at that moment. I do remember our conversations, our arguments, and our flirtations over the next three weeks...I remember clearly the first letter I got from him while he was still at camp and I was back at home in which he told me that camp just wasn't the same without me.

I now know that it was empty flirtation at that point, but it doesn't matter. I was hooked. I wrote in my diary, in a very painful and self-aware sixteen-year-old way that I thought that I was in love with him in October of 1994.

The best thing that ever happened to me was that Josh, somewhere in our letters over the next year, fell in love with me. I told Lisa, about Josh, when I first met her, that, "I would marry Josh Tate."

I think, though, that I felt like I had imagined how he was as the year went on. A month of getting to know someone, and then ten months of only letters, makes for a strange series of dips and swells of emotion, and by the time we met up again at camp in 1995, I had another boyfriend.

I'm not proud to say that I flirted a lot that summer- probably a good indicator that I should not have had a serious boyfriend at that point- but I couldn't seem to keep myself from it.

Josh Tate was then, and is now, a remarkable person, the kind of person you meet rarely. He was more than I thought a boy could be at that age, intellectual, kind, funny, interesting...I left thinking that three months around this person made the last year of my life pale.

This is how it's always been. Life is better with Josh around. It's palatable.

The next summer we started dating, and I ended up following him to Houghton, and we were engaged and married a little more than seven years after we first met.

This year is the sixteenth year that I have known Josh- that I've been able to call him my friend, that I've loved him- and as I am going to be 32 in April, that's a fairly good chunk of my life.

For half of my lifetime, I've been blessed to know Josh Tate. I would not go back in time to fix any mistake I've made, correct any flaw I could change, if only because I would never want to walk a path that led me anywhere but to him.

Thanks be to God.

(Happy Valentine's Day, Josh. It may be fat, but you know you like it. And if you don't, I might chase you around the a-frame again.)