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Two days after our wedding in Chicago, Les and I were nestled into a cottage, surrounded by towering pines along the picturesque Oregon coast. A few miles to the south were the famous coastal sand dunes where we planned to ride horses later that week. And to the north was a quaint harbor village where we thought we might spend another day leisurely looking at shops and eating dinner by candlelight in a rustic inn. Other than that, we had nothing on our itinerary for the next five days except enjoying the beach and each other, rain or shine.

Neither of us could have dreamed up a more wonderful scenario. Not that everything was perfect. For instance, we locked ourselves out of our rental car the day after we arrived. When Les realized the keys were in the ignition and the doors were locked, he took his first stab at being an everything's-under-control husband. "You stay here in the cabin," he told me. "I'm going to walk to that filling station on the main road and get some help."

"I want to go with you," I responded.

"Are you sure? It might rain."

"It'll be fun. Let's go."

We walked and talked the two or three miles to find a pay phone where we made arrangements for a locksmith to pick us up and take us back to our car. Sitting on a curb, we waited, saying nothing, while a couple of seagulls chatted overhead. Les was fiddling with a stick he'd picked up on our walk when I realized several minutes had passed and neither of us had said a word. It was an easy stillness, however, a kind of eloquent silence where we were content, comfortable, not talking.

That's when the thought hit me: I had captured true love. Les and I had dated for nearly seven years before we got married, so this wasn't the dizzying, starry-eyed love of a new relationship. The love I'm talking about was clear-eyed and grounded. I had married a man who loved me deeply, just as I loved him. This was reality and I was simply taking it in, relishing the silence and stillness of having no other purpose than that of being together. We had created a marriage. And it was good. So good, in fact, that we could practically live on it. And we did, for a time.

Like any other couple, Les and I longed to find ways to make our love endure. Part of the impetus for our vision came from reading A Severe Mercy (Harper SanFrancisco), the real-life love story of Sheldon and Davy Vanauken, a couple who not only dreamed about building a soulful union, but devised a concrete strategy for creating a "Shining Barrier." Its goal: to make their love invulnerable. Its plan: to share everything.

If one of them liked something, there must be something to like in it—and the other must find it. Whether poetry, strawberries or an interest in ships, Sheldon and Davy purposed to share every single thing either of them liked. That way they would create a thousand strands, great and small, that would link them together. They would become so close that it would be unthinkable for either of them to suppose that they could ever recreate such closeness with anyone else. Total sharing, they believed, was the ultimate secret of a love that would last forever.

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