On our first date, a man took me to feed ducks to crocodiles. We've been together ever since.

• When I was 20 years old, I went on a date to feed ducks to crocodiles in Cambodia.
• The entire date was the closest thing to a perfect date.

The man brought out a duck, which was croaking furiously in his arms in protest, to our spot on the walkway. Philipp looked at me: "Should we give it to the babies?" We were on a crocodile farm in Siem Reap, Cambodia, standing above pits of the massive predators just a few hundred yards from a shop that sold purses and belts made out of their hide.

While I'd gone on other adventures with Philipp before and shared a small bed with him in the hostel he owned, this was our first official date, and we'd just paid for the chance to feed a live duck to crocodiles.

I couldn't look away when the farm worker threw the duck into a pit full of small crocodiles, no matter how much I wanted to. The scenes were grotesque but fascinating, and the two of us traded commentary back and forth as nature (admittedly, aided by us) took its course. This might seem like a repulsive first date activity, but when Philipp put his arm around my shoulders as we watched, I felt butterflies anyway.

The date didn't end there

Once there was nothing left of the duck but a few feathers, we hopped on Philipp's motorbike and sped down a road lined with lotus farms toward the hump of land known as Phnom Krom. At the top lies a dilapidated temple older than the oldest structure at Angkor Wat, and the surrounding hillside provides a view out onto a patchwork of rice paddies and floating villages teetering on stilts.

Before urging the motorbike up the winding road to the top of Phnom Krom, Philipp and I stopped by the food stands at the base of the hill for a snack. We purchased a number of crispy cakes made out of tiny shrimp with skins on from a woman in Khmer floral pajamas, then rode a loop around the villages at the base of the hill, shouting sok sabai in greeting to the children who ran barefoot on the side of the dusty red road.

At the top of the hill, we parked by the house where monks in orange robes lived. Once I'd jumped off the motorbike, Philipp opened the seat to reveal the bottle of red wine and two glasses he'd hidden there. I could have sworn the cheap Chilean wine was a perfect pairing for those salty shrimp cakes as Philipp, and I sat on a rock, our legs touching, watching the sky's colors shift and listening to the music that echoed up the hill from a pagoda below.

We've been together ever since

Although I didn't know it then, as a 20-year-old backpacker, I was sitting next to my future husband.

I'd go on to move full-time to Cambodia a few months later and spend almost two years there with Philipp. Our current relationship is built on the foundation of those experiences as expats in Cambodia. Together, as foreigners (he is German, I'm American) in a country we both loved, we shared in our outsider-ness. While hitchhiking in the middle of the night so we could reach a hidden temple on the edge of a national park for sunrise, or taking a three-day journey through remote villages where we ate porridge with locals and slept on pagoda floors, there was no cultural barrier, only a world that grew bigger each day.

At the top of Phnom Krom, we finished the bottle of wine and then kissed until dark. Crocodile feast and all, it was the closest thing to a perfect date I've ever experienced.