It's one of the most isolated bits of land in the world. It sits about 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile in the Pacific Ocean, and Chile is the closest piece of mainland around. The Hawaiian Islands are pretty far out there, too, but they are an archipelago—a string of islands not far from one another. Easter Island is all alone.

Easter Island has long been something of a mystery, too, mostly because of a set of giant heads carved of stone and set up, by means uncertain, facing the sea. The most recent theory is that they commemorate important ancestors and that Easter Island was settled during the great migration of Polynesian peoples that spread north from Tahiti—or in the case of Easter Island, south and east.

Easter Island was invaded about 1,400 years ago. It once was covered with trees, but is now barren and dependent mostly on Chile and tourism for survival. It was taken over by Chile mainly because it is close (well, pretty close) and no one else really wanted it.

But I digress.

My friend and his future wife met because he was on the island working on a story for a surfing magazine. For most of his working life he has traveled the world in search of surfing spots. Good surfing places are rare, believe it or not, but in this age of air travel they are easier and easier to reach. My friend has been almost everywhere looking for them—from South Africa to Bali. He's one of the most traveled young men I know.

So it was on Easter Island that he ran into his future wife.

The romance had a couple of major handicaps right from the start.

The bride-to-be didn't speak English, and my friend didn't speak either Spanish or the Polynesian variation that his future wife spoke. There was an age difference. My friend was in his 40s. The woman from Easter Island was in her 20s.

But the major difficulty was distance.

Getting to Easter Island is not just a matter of hopping on any old bus or plane. It is a long way from Southern California, where my friend works, to Chile, where one then has to switch planes to catch the one that goes back and forth from Easter Island.

But love tends to resolve things like that. First his future wife came to California for an extended visit. She was still in love, but she also got homesick for the island.

It's hard for me to know why one would get homesick for a treeless island with a lot of stone statues, but homesickness seems to affect us all, no matter where we come from.

So my friend made a trip back to Easter Island with her and stayed there for awhile. He didn't get homesick, but it wasn't possible for him to do much writing about surfing on the island. So he came home to California.

Time passed. He pined for her. She pined for him.

She came to California for awhile. Then she went back home. During the visits she learned more English and he picked up a little of whatever they speak on Easter Island. And, in the end, like all good love stories, love won out. They worked out a system that could make them both happy. They would spend some time in California and less time on Easter Island.

I tell you this story not only to show how love conquers all—even distance and language barriers—but also to illustrate how randomly our lives combine and yet how they somehow work out. Some of us marry the girl or boy next door, but a surprising number don't. Instead it is a chance encounter that changes our lives forever.

I know, for example, a couple who were united for at least 50 years by a look "across a crowded room," in their case a crowded restaurant, and another who met by chance one evening and now have been married almost as long as the first couple. Who knows what was in the look? Something unforgettable, apparently.

The way in which we find our life partners varies with every couple, and it's as endlessly fascinating as having to go all the way to Easter Island to find "the one."

Despite the statistics, marriage still seems to work. It even works in countries where marriage is left not to chance but to professional matchmakers and marriage brokers, where arranged marriages are the norm rather than the exception. Even there, chance has a lot to do with whether a marriage is filled with love rather than just duty and devotion.

So I can't tell you what made the Easter Island-California romance happen anymore than I can predict how well it will turn out in the end.

But something certainly keeps the fires of love burning in the world, and that's important.