It's a lovely story posted on the New York Times web site back in 2008. Read it today, and just had to pass it on.
WEDDINGS: VOWS; Barbara Mangini and Eric Andersen
IN the spring of 1997, Barbara Mangini hit a low point, actually a sinkhole. She was about to turn 40 and her long-term live-in boyfriend showed no signs of proposing marriage.
Ms. Mangini, the marketing director of Horticulture magazine in Boston, decided to end the relationship. She remembers thinking, ''I'm risking not finding someone until I'm 50, but I'm going to go ahead with this and not be scared.''
At the end of March, her boyfriend moved out of their apartment in the Beacon Hill section of Boston. ''I felt peaceful with myself,'' Ms. Mangini said. ''I knew whatever turn my life took it would be interesting.''
As it happened, her life took an uncommonly interesting turn. Two days later, she had brunch in Boston with an artist friend, Michael Walek, who gave her the telephone number of his longtime colleague Eric Andersen, adding that Mr. Andersen was an artist, a spiritual-minded surfer and, like her, newly unattached.
That night at 8, ''I just called him,'' Ms. Mangini said. ''It was as though he were waiting for my call. We talked for a long time, and he called the next morning, the next night. We talked about family, kids, music, creativity, spirituality, our careers. It was the strangest thing.''
At the time, Mr. Andersen's second marriage had just ended. A decorative painter specializing in murals and trompe l'oeil and also a yoga enthusiast, he was living in a loft in Waltham, Mass., but planning to move. ''I was ready to go to Tibet to study Zen Buddhism, but the problem was, there's no surf in Tibet,'' said Mr. Andersen, now 48. ''And then, Barbara just flew into my life.''
On the third day of their telephone romance, Ms. Mangini told Mr. Andersen she loved him. ''It just came rolling off my tongue,'' she said. ''Then I screamed, 'Oh my God, what did I just say?' ''
Soon after that, Ms. Mangini left for a vacation at Mr. Walek's house in Key West, Fla. Once there, Mr. Walek recalled, she immediately dialed Mr. Andersen and spent the rest of her time on the phone with him. ''At 4 A.M., the line would be occupied,'' he said. ''She was like the 'Odalisque' of Ingres by a pool, this voluptuous woman by the water's edge, looking over her shoulder mysteriously because someone might be walking by, and she was having this long, amorous phone call.''
Back in Boston, Ms. Mangini announced that she had found the man she was going to marry. ''She said, 'I've never met him, I've never seen him, but I love him,' '' recalled Bill Saunders, her sister's husband. ''I said, 'You're out of your mind.' ''
After 22 days on the phone, friends reported, they had even chosen names for their unborn children -- Lily for a girl and Lang for a boy. (While in Florida, Ms. Mangini had actually bought a Lilly Pulitzer diaper bag.)
On April 19, the two finally met in person, at her apartment. ''We smooched immediately,'' she remembered, ''but we were still shaking a little bit, so I made martinis to calm us down.'' After that night they were inseparable, and in October they traveled to Greece, where he proposed. ''Tears came flying off my face,'' Ms. Mangini said. ''They were the happiest tears of my life.''
On May 16, the couple were married before 85 guests at the Greenfield Hill Congregational Church in Fairfield, Conn. The bride, who grew up nearby in Darien, appeared in a lemonade-yellow dress embroidered with pastel flowers. ''Yellow is great, isn't it?'' she said. ''People who like yellow don't like to do housework.''
The couple now live in Newburyport, Mass., in a beach house on stilts. Describing their life together, the bride said: ''We walk on the beach. We eat a lot of grilled fish. He reads more classics than I do. He is the best guy I have ever known to send out for a video. He will come back with a Merchant and Ivory film. It's amazing.''
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