Every love book should open with how we met. Here is how to tell it.

Ask any couple how they met and watch what happens. One starts, the other corrects, and the correction is the story. Those details, who spoke first, what was playing, what you noticed and did not say, are what make a book about you rather than about any couple. A book that opens on them has your partner's attention from the first page.

You do not need prose. You need notes, the way you would text a friend. Where were you, and why were you there that day. Who spoke first and what the first words were, as near as you remember. What you noticed about them in the first minute. One thing that went wrong. What you told someone afterwards. The book is written from notes like these, in your voice, and you change any line that does not sound like you.

The first meeting was almost never photographed, which is the point of painting it. From up to ten photos of each of you, the two of you are painted into the scene as you looked then, at the bar, in the lecture hall, at the wrong gate at the airport. The scene is built from your notes, so the details in the picture are yours: the drink, the coat, the dog that introduced you.

How you met is chapter one of fourteen. The book moves through the memories you choose, the first trip, the move, the proposal, the ordinary evening that turned out to matter, and ends where you are now. Thirty pages, hardcover, approved by you page by page before it prints. More on what a personalized love book is, or the anniversary book if there is a date coming.