‘Law and Order: SVU’ star Mariska Hargitay was 40 when she got married to ‘Younger’ star Peter Hermann and she doesn’t regret it even once.

There are some people who find their perfect person in their mature years. They get lucky after waiting for the right person to come along. It doesn’t make them any less romantic. Instead, they might be more romantic as they had the patience to look for their true love. Actress Mariska Hargitay, 57, is one of those people. Married since 2004 to Peter Hermann, 53, she waited patiently until she found her soulmate.

The couple met in 2002 on the set of Law and Order: SVU, and it felt like divine intervention to her. Hermann had guest-starred on the show and shortly after the shoot ended, he asked her on a date. His date idea was a unique one and it is close to her memories many years later too. “We went to church together, and it was like getting hit with a lightning bolt,” Hargitay told People.

It took one date for her to know what she felt about him. “As a little girl you’re told, ‘Oh, when it’s the right person, you’ll know. You’ll know,'” she told the outlet. “But listen, I had been engaged previously, and I never knew.”

During the date, Hargitay felt “overwhelmed” by her feelings of love for him and something unexpected happened. “I just started sobbing. Peter thought I was crying because I was so moved by the service. No, it was because I was just overwhelmed, realizing he was the one,” she added.

The pair has been married for 17 years now and are parents to three children, August, 14, Amaya, 9, and Andrew, 9. Their marriage has been so successful that she is often “reminded on this journey that I married the right one.” She added, “I waited and married the right one.”

Hargitay, who has been the star of Law & Order: SVU for a record-breaking 22 seasons, fell in love at first sight but her husband took some more time to decide. He remembers the moment he knew he wanted to be with her.

“It was Mariska’s birthday, 40th birthday,” Hermann told People. “And I actually saw [her] with all of the people that she loved around her. It was like seeing this person who was now in the soil, that she was just dying to be planted in it. Right? Which was this abundance of people and this abundance of love and I thought, ‘I want to be part of that soil.'”

The couple got married in the same church where they went for their first date. “We got married and we knew that it was going to be good and I think we both knew, sort of, what we found,” said the 57-year-old. “I never thought it could be this good,” she added.

After almost two decades together, the couple’s key to a happy marriage is laughter. “I never thought I would have this much laughter in my life,” said the 53-year-old. They do fight, and it is only natural to do so while managing their acting careers along with three kids. However, they use laughter to “find [their] way back to each other.”

“It’s this fantastically, wonderfully ridiculous way that we can swing back and forth any number of times in any given day,” said Hermann. “But fundamentally we know we have the same destination,” he added.

The Younger star told Fox News that he and his wife bump their “way through” their marriage. “Sometimes we are wonderfully elegant in the way we make it work and sometimes we’re not at all, and it devolves into, ‘Why didn’t you pack the right sneakers?’ Or, ‘I thought you got lunch ready.’ And then sometimes we look at each other and we’re like, ‘Wow, we’re doing this, we got this, this is OK.’ But, the fact is, we just get to do it together (…) and I cannot tell you what a gift it is to get to do all of it with her,” he added.