Dustin Bowen and Mandy Meyers

One date was all it took for Mandy Meyers to burst into her parents’ home and declare that she’d met the man she would someday marry. What she didn’t know that evening, following her first date with Dustin Bowen, was that more than a decade would pass before her proclamation would come true.

But as the couple, both 30, looked into each other’s eyes during their wedding April 30 at the Castaways in Burbank, they knew the long wait was worth it.

“Our wedding was the most amazing love fest and best day of my life,” said Meyers, a hairstylist in Santa Monica.

It all began 11 years earlier at a late- night dance party, when the pair met amid loud music and hundreds of other teenagers. Soon, they were strolling along Huntington Beach Pier on their first date.

“Dustin was a man of few words that night, but every word he said was exactly what I wanted to hear,” she said.

Four years later, they moved into an apartment in Tarzana. But it would take another six years before he proposed.

It happened on the 10th anniversary of their first date, during a romantic weekend on Catalina Island. Perched on a large boulder near the shore, he cracked open a bottle of champagne and poured some into a plastic cup. Then Bowen got down on one knee, took out an engagement ring and asked Meyers to marry him.

Her reply was an enthusiastic “yes.”

“But then I asked him what took him so long to ask me. He said, ‘I had to learn how to be a man.’ How beautiful was that?”

— Kim Kabar, Custom Publishing Writer