Kelly Flowers and Erik Smith

First impressions can be a bitch. Depending on whom you ask, they can be spot-on indicators of personality and lifestyle or superficial, dead-wrong glimpses of someone who is, essentially, a stranger.

Kelly Flowers and Erik Smith's first impressions of each other turned out to be a little of both.

The two were set up by a mischievous mutual friend in the winter of 1997. The friend told Kelly, then a 27-year-old social worker in the middle of a divorce, that Erik, a 25-year-old garden-store manager, thought she was good-looking. This might have been a nice compliment under most circumstances, but it just wasn't true. Erik had never even laid eyes on Kelly.

When they did meet for the first time, neither was impressed--at all. "I was looking at him thinking, 'Who is this stinky hippie?'" Kelly recalls. Meanwhile, "He was thinking, 'Who is this girl with the attitude?'"

Erik claims the two had nothing to say to each other. "The first two meetings we said no more than hello and good-bye," he recalls.

When they did finally change their minds about each other, they had a little help from alcohol. On a night out with friends in December, the two engaged in heavy drinking as well as what Kelly terms "heavy flirtation." Getting together would have to wait: Shortly after this episode, Erik went on a six-week holiday to visit family on the East Coast.

Their first date--at the Southeast diner Dots--was no superficial outing. "We immediately fell into a serious relationship," Erik says. "There was a deep connection right off the bat."

Trouble was, neither was exactly ready for something so intense.

"I just wanted to date, to have fun," Kelly says. "My intentions were more visceral than anything else."

Though there may have been a reluctance to begin such a serious endeavor, the two were inseparable after that first date.

Still, theirs is not a picture-perfect tale.

"I was still processing the ending of a serious relationship, and he had never been in a serious relationship," Kelly says. "We had a really bumpy first couple of years."

Erik agrees: "We both didn't know how to make it work. We wanted to, but we were driving each other crazy."

After three years of being together, the two broke up in December 2000. Erik, who was living with Kelly in Northeast Portland, moved out, and Kelly started dating someone else.

Unwilling to let go, Erik embarked on a campaign of reconciliation that was, to say the least, persistent. He called, wrote letters and sent flowers. When he would show up on Kelly's doorstep, she'd tell him to go away.

"In the beginning, she thought I was just heartbroken and regretful," Erik recalls. "But I actually wanted to fix things and make them better. It was difficult for me to convince her."

When they did get back together months later, the difference in the relationship was monumental. "In that first year, we were constantly amazed at the growth and change," Kelly says. On Dec. 21, 2001, the two were engaged.

Kelly's take on marriage this time around is decidedly different from the last. "At the age of 22, I couldn't even conceptualize 30, much less the rest of my life," she says.

Now she's thinking about how to build a relationship that will last over the long term. When she considers who she might be able to depend upon, if she ever needs special care, "of course it's Erik," she says. "Who else?"

WWeek 2015