As two people newly in love, we talked and talked. We were in our early 30s then, so our talk included a history and a reckoning of all our previous loves, how they endured and how they ended. We talked about our past loves to see how they stacked up against the present one.

Were any of them as big as this? No. How could they be?

Falling in love for us meant falling into talk. We talked about our memories, broken bones, broken hearts and one broken marriage. We talked about our mothers, one Jewish and one Italian, constantly cooking and feeding. We talked about our fathers, neither of whom cooked or fed.

We talked about friends, come and gone. We talked about our careers, climbing the ladder of success, falling off the ladder, leaning in and leaning out.

We talked about our dreams: of traveling, of marriage, of how many children we would like and what we would name them. With those subjects addressed, we turned to smaller details and anecdotes, the stories about getting drunk, getting lost, crashing the car, stealing a candy bar and falling down a flight of subway stairs before a job interview.