My husband and I met thanks to a wardrobe mishap

• I've always preferred brutal honesty, so I told a total stranger that his fly was down.
• He bought me a beer and a corndog, but I wasn't looking for a relationship.
• We've been together for almost 20 years now.

"Your fly is down." That's the first thing I ever said to my now-husband.

In my defense, even though I didn't know him, he was talking with two other people I did know. Also, I'm the kind of person who wants people to tell me when I have food in my teeth. I prefer brutal honesty over silent embarrassment.

He thanked me and offered to buy me a drink for my kindness. "I'd rather have a corndog," I countered. Mortified doesn't begin to describe what I probably should've felt. I had just told a guy his fly was down and that I wanted a corndog as a thank you. But when he offered to buy me both and his eyes lingered on mine, I suspected he might like me, and my mortification slipped away.

I wasn't looking for a relationship

Fresh out of a relationship, I had just promised myself that morning that I would not get involved with anyone new for at least a few months. We were at a local band concert in a small venue, and the corndog in question was at the restaurant next door. So, I told him maybe later on the food and drink. He told me to find him whenever I wanted to collect my thank you, that he would be ready.

We parted ways, me back to my group of friends and he to his. I thought that would be the end of things, but when I went to leave after the show, he saw me and asked if I was ready for the drink he owed me. I don't remember what words I stumbled through, some version of "you don't have to do that, really." But a few minutes after I slid onto a bar stool next door, there he was next to me.

We sat side-by-side at the bar, ordered beers and corndogs as promised, and started a conversation that lasted until the wee hours of the night. People came and went, the music pulsed around us, but nothing interrupted the comfortable intimacy building between us.

It was the start of an endless conversation

It didn't matter what we talked about (and our topics covered the gamut from banal details to deeper thoughts); the conversation was easy. One topic was that he was sure he would be a lifelong bachelor but wished that wasn't the truth. His ex-girlfriend was at the show, and it made him think perhaps he'd made a mistake with their break-up. I told him that I thought he was too caught up on the wrong thing, and I was sure he'd find someone if he wanted.

As our conversation stretched into the night, we discovered something surprising — we weren't strangers after all. One of my good friends had been cutting his hair for nearly a decade. I knew his last roommate. Our social circles overlapped in a dozen ways, yet somehow, we had never really met. Or so I thought.

Then he said, "So, where is your curly-haired boyfriend?"

It turned out this wasn't our first meeting. We had actually met twice before, also at concerts. He remembered. I didn't. And as I explained that my boyfriend and I had recently broken up, I watched his expression shift. I could see the exact moment he realized he wished he hadn't mentioned his ex-girlfriend earlier in our conversation.

I never doubted his interest in me

As the night ended, he asked for my number and then texted me before I made the five-minute ride home. He wanted me to know, without a doubt, that he was interested in seeing me again whenever I was ready. We went on our first date two days later and never stopped dating.

Nearly two decades, three cities, three children, and plenty of life's ups and downs later, we're still building on that same connection we felt that night. Throughout it all, my husband has been steady and unwavering. In our early dating days, my friends used to wish he had a sibling; these days, they jokingly call us "relationship goals." And I couldn't agree more.

A loose zipper and a real-life meet-cute led me to a life more perfect than I could have imagined. It turns out that sometimes love is like the movies — just with better snacks.