Some love stories begin with chance meetings, glances across the room, or even horrible blind dates that actually work out.

There's conflict, fights, breaking up, making up, drama - all that great stuff Danielle Steele writes about in romance novels.

Maybe I should feel like something is wrong, because we celebrated our 12th anniversary on Tuesday, and we haven't had any of that.

But our unconventional story began with the goddess of love herself, Venus.

Venus, the German shepherd, probably didn't intend to play Cupid - or maybe she did.

I am pretty sure she felt like she orchestrated our whole relationship.

She was our unintentional yenta, after all, escaping from her kennel at Lamar's mother's house while she was supposed to be dog-sitting while Lamar was out of town working.

The dog ran wild for a week.

I was the one who rounded her up a couple of days before Lamar came home to get her.

I am not one to believe in love at first sight. Unless there is a dog involved, and then, it is empirically possible.

I fell in love with this dog the minute I saw her, scratching her ears and letting her lick my hand through the gate as I put her back in her kennel.

I didn't know who her owner was, but I knew somehow, that dog was supposed to be mine.

Lamar showed up at his mother's Estee Lauder counter a few days later, not too happy she had lied to him about his dog.

I was at my Clinique counter, telling a friend about a new cream eyeshadow.

"Gotta go, cute guy at Lauder," I said, hanging up the phone.

Lamar has said he knew then he wanted to marry me, standing in my stocking feet, hair piled on my head and decked out in a Clinique lab coat because I had been good to his dog.

I've joked he wanted to marry me because I had food and cable -which he does not really refute - and I married him to get the dogs.

"Daddy didn't really marry you for cable and food, did he?" Cole will question, not 100 percent sure. "Y'all loved each other."

Being a hopeless romantic, Cole thinks everyone has a fairy tale romance like Pam and Jim on "The Office" or Waddles and the goat on "Gravity Falls."

So naturally he thinks our backstory involved a lot of romantic gestures like roses, poems and candlelight. I have to remind Cole real life romance is not like you see on TV.

And that his father is not really good at the woo part of a relationship; Lamar hasn't even officially proposed.

"Do you think you would have even met Daddy if it hadn't been for Venus?"

Maybe.

Who knows?

He was about ready to move back to Colorado - if he had, I probably would have never met him.

Lamar's kind of shy, too.

He may never had a reason to speak to me if he hadn't thanked me for saving Venus, let alone ask me out.

His mother was the one who called me later to ask if she could give him my number.

She had a caveat though: "He's got two more of those big German shepherd things at home - three of them. And they are inside. They shed everywhere."

I pretty much judge people based on how they treat animals. And being an animal lover is on the top of my list of redeeming qualities in people.

The fact he had three and they were inside gave me a pretty good idea of what kind of person he was. So I gave her the OK.

During one of our early dates, he asked me if I wanted to go meet the dogs.

I said yes and wondered if Venus would remember me.

She did, running straight to me, leaning against my legs, and doing her signature paw on my foot move she would do, as if to say I was her person.

And I was - for the 10 years I had her after we married, she was my soulmate and constant companion.

"So, I am here, and we're a family, all because of Venus?"" Cole said, thinking all of this over.

"Yup," I said. "All because of a dog named after the mythical goddess of love."

Pretty appropriate, if I do say so myself.

Sudie Crouch is an award winning humor columnist and author of the e-published novel, "The Dahlman Files: A Tony Dahlman Paranormal Mystery."