Inside Mariska Hargitay’s Emotional 1st Date with Husband Peter Hermann at Church

Unlike Benson’s rocky personal life, Hargitay and Hermann got together shortly after meeting and have been inseparable ever since. And it all started with a date at church.

Mariska Hargitay knew her husband was The One right away

If Hermann looks familiar, it may be because he’s appeared in more than 30 episodes of SVU as attorney Trevor Langan. They met on set in 2002 and decided to go out once his first episode had wrapped. Specifically, he asked her if she’d like to come to church with him. “We went to church together, and it was like getting hit with a lightning bolt,” she later recalled to People.

“I just started sobbing. Peter thought I was crying because I was so moved by the service,” she said. “No, it was because I was just overwhelmed, realizing he was the one.” After the date, she confessed her feelings to a friend. “I told her, ‘This is it. This is the man I’m going to marry.’”

“We knew that we wanted to be married,” Hargitay added of their plans. “We got married, and we knew that it was going to be good, and I think we both knew, sort of, what we found. We sort of knew that we found the right one.”

She continued, “I never thought it could be this good, and I never knew that I’d be reminded on the journey that I’d marry the right one. That I waited and married the right one and it’s better than I thought it was. Because sometimes you take a snapshot and you go, ‘I can’t believe this is my life.'”

Hermann added that humor is how they navigate the hard moments that happen in every relationship. “It’s the way we find our way back to each other,” Hermann said. “It’s this fantastically, wonderfully ridiculous way that we can swing back and forth any number of times in any given day. But fundamentally we know we have the same destination. We know where we’re headed, and it’s good. And we know we’ll get there together.”