I Was The Lucky One... & I still am.

photo from Easter 2011

My husband and I both grew up in LA, specifically The Valley. We were born the same year {1976} and attended high schools less than 10 minutes apart. We knew people who knew each other, attended the other's school functions, carnivals, and sports events. I worked at the mall {at Wet Seal} and he was a mall rat. Our paths must have crossed a hundred times, yet we did not know each other.

After high school, in 1994, he moved to Las Vegas to attend UNLV and my father had moved to Vegas a few years prior. On my visits, our paths could have crossed there a hundred times more. But we never met.

Almost ten later, in 2003, when I was 27 and after a broken engagement -- I moved from The Hills back home to The Valley {approximately 10 minutes ;} and into an apartment with my cousin and my Boston terrier, Billy. I wasn't looking for love, I had just been given my freedom for the first time in my adult life. I was searching for myself and was excited to see where life would take me.

On moving day, after I had returned the U-Haul truck and parked my own car out front on the street, I walked into the outdoor courtyard of my new "home" carrying the last few items from the move. I remember wearing green shorts and my slip-on checkered Vans and I stopped dead in my tracks when I thought I saw someone I knew from my past standing at his apartment door ahead of me. I had that rush of adrenaline run through me, from my feet all the way up to my throat, but continued forward. And then he looked at me and said, "Hi...I'm Pep," and I relaxed, assured that I had mistaken him for someone else. My new apartment was just upstairs from his.

When I look back, I wonder if it wasn't a mistaken identity at all but more of that stroke of destiny and knowingness you feel when something is just meant to be. It was truly electric.

It took a few months for me to sort of come out of my shell and meet everyone in our Melrose Place-like apartment complex, but when I finally did, he and I slowly became the best of friends. I felt completely safe and completely myself around him, but we didn't have the "love connection" until May or June of the following year. It happened accidentally, actually, like in a movie, and it was wildly exciting and very romantic.

When my apartment lease was up in August, we moved into a condo together and two years later, when we were both 30, he proposed and we eloped and were married. We'll be celebrating our 6-year wedding anniversary in September, and 9 years as best friends.

I'm not quite sure I believe in destiny, but there was definitely some magnetic force pulling, no, pushing us together for years... maybe even forever. I believe nothing is coincidence, so it was going to happen, it was just a matter of when.

But what if I had never moved into that apartment complex? Would we still be on a journey to finding each other? I'm so lucky that I did... and we did.




Mark your calendars - The Lucky One opens in theaters April 22! Watch the trailer on The Lucky One website and get updates on The Lucky One Facebook page.

For all obvious reasons, I will most definitely see this movie. A. I am a woman. B. I can't resist a great love story. C. I love a movie that will make me cry. D. I love Zac Efron. And E. It's by Nicholas Sparks, the writer of The Notebook. So yeah, I'll probably also record it on my DVR once it hits the movie channels so I can watch it repetitively...I can't help it, I'm a sucker for romance.


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Prizing

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