I fell in love with my husband because of the way he served coffee to a woman in a wheelchair.

My crush actually started long before ever seeing him behind the bar. The very reason we made coffee together every Tuesday from 2 to 6 p.m. at Everyday Joes was because I was (and am) friends with the volunteer coordinator, and asked her if she could hook a sister up. So the story isn’t quite so serendipitous as it implies when I tell people we met working at a coffee shop, but it was in that context that he moved from ‘cute and interesting’ into the ‘I will marry this man or someone like him’ category.

Every shift, around 5 p.m., a group of adults with disabilities would come into the shop. These were not the polite/silly/unassuming kind of disabled that give those who serve them the appearance of being super patient and accepting without ever really having to exercise either of those qualities. These were the kind that butt people in line, say inappropriate things, have their crack hanging out of their sweat pants and shout things at you. I learned very quickly that I did not have the loving and serving thing that we’d been talking about at the church I was a brand new member of. These people just made me uncomfortable.

One woman was particularly nasty. She would buzz up to the counter in her noisy wheelchair and bark an order at me, always asking for some obscure item we didn’t have and then acting extremely inconvenienced by us not having it. “What kind of shop are you trying to run, not even carrying sugar free crème brûlée syrup?” Much to my chagrin, she never made good on her threats to stop coming in.

The few times that we would have what she wanted, we’d make it for her, and then she’d complain that she had ordered something else and demand her money back. It didn’t help matters that she was hard to look at – her legs and arms were disfigured, her clothes often ridiculous and her wheelchair loud and too large for most coffee shop aisles and entryways– another constant source of her frustration.

I normally worked the cash register while Steven made drinks, and would do my best to keep my mouth shut when the woman came in, long forgetting about loving her and mostly just trying to get her through the line and out the door as fast as possible.

One week, Steven and I traded places.

It was no surprise that when she came in, he was polite and respectful – I’d never seen him act any differently to a customer – but he also wasn’t afraid to look her in the eye, make her laugh, take her complaints seriously and gently remind her that we were just volunteers. When her coffee was made, despite the impending line, he walked to the other side of the counter with it and followed her to where she wanted to sit. And then moved it again when she realized that that table “was filthy.” He thanked her for coming in and then returned to his post at the register nonchalantly; as if every 20-year-old with a lip ring would have done exactly the same thing.

I on the other hand had never seen anything like it, from myself or my peers and especially not from someone with long hair and enormous biceps. I was done for.

It became clear after months of the woman-in-the-wheelchair kind of service that this was not a one-off incident, but the way Steven lives. He is still the first to offer help to the elderly at the store, to move someone’s couch, to hold a door for the person behind him and to make the bed of our tenant who suffers from PTSD so that he’ll stop hallucinating that someone is hiding in the pile of dirty blankets. He is a constant reminder that people in stores and behind counters and on buses and in wheelchairs and in my family are actually people, and that it’s our job to love them regardless of how convenient it happens to be.

I think it’s safe to say at this point that he’s not doing it to impress me. But four years of marriage later, it still does.

Four years ago this week, we stood on stage in the same room where we’d made coffee together and, against the better judgement of every thing I’d ever read about getting married under 25, I readily gave Steven the rest of my days, never doubting that If I end up in a wheel chair, angry and hard to look at, he will follow me around with my mug until I find the perfect seat, and I’ll forget to say thank you and he won’t notice because he won’t feel the need to be thanked for something he sees as the beautiful part of us all being humans together in this place.

Trusting that he’d do that — that’s my marriage.