is an Inquirer staff writer

I can tell you the exact moment I fell in love with my husband. He did something that reminded me so much of the man I'd been having an affair with since my teens that I had to marry him.

Nick picked up his guitar and sang Bruce Springsteen's "Wild Billy's Circus Story," a rollicking but obscure ode to carnival life.

Nick may not have had me at hello, but he did by the time he got to "God save the human cannonball."

Springsteen saved me when I was a suburban Cleveland teenager, bored and unconsciously seeking fever and fire. My mom advised channeling that desire into the Catholic Church by praying more. "Mass is what you bring to it," she said.

But the first time religious fervor burned in my veins was when I heard Springsteen's "Jungleland." That street opera, with its two hearts beating, "soul engines running through a night so tender," felt like a calling to another life, where stories of escape and redemption can come true.

The men in those songs take chances. They sweat it out on the streets of runaway American dreams, instead of wandering around in blue blazers, ushering at church, and tending their lawns, which was what the men in my life seemed to do.

Springsteen's characters are no suburban chumps, but they are primarily male. It would be easy to see his female characters as bit players, side plots in epic tales of men throwing it all away in a meeting across the river or while revving a stolen car down on Eldridge Avenue. The truth, though, is that women drive many Springsteen songs, and we adore him for it. It doesn't hurt that he still looks great in a pair of jeans (even if he should lose that Luciferian soul patch) but it's his lyrical devotion to women that leaves us swooning.

In "Thunder Road," Mary is a vision as she dances across the porch as the radio plays. If, later in that song, Springsteen offers Mary a backhanded compliment with "You ain't a beauty but hey, you're all right," it reassures any woman who ever felt she had to look like a sun-kissed Farrah Fawcett to get a date.

And then there is the promise of sex. Springsteen's male characters don't dither. They don't leave women wondering if maybe they just want to be friends. They are waiting with their cars, and if a Springsteen protagonist makes it clear that the ride ain't free, a woman might chance that for a guy who later pledges "to be your friend, to guard your dreams and visions."

On paper, these men can sound like psychopaths, but the music softens them. The character in "For You" breaks through windows and rams through doors. But when Springsteen desperately sings those words, surfing along a whitewater tumble of piano and drums, the lover in "For You" becomes more sweet than threatening. He loves a crazy woman. He doesn't care if she has found someone else. He's for her, and she and her "nursery mouth" are for him, and there is nothing complicated about it.

Springsteen's female fans also get romance. In "4th of July, Asbury Park," there is that little matter of the waitress, but the subtle harmonies sweep listeners up in the desire to be Sandy, slow-dancing on the boardwalk with Springsteen in his leather jacket and jeans, the aurora of the pier lights rising behind them. His women lift their men out of their despair to better days.

Yes, I know some people hate Springsteen. They think all his songs sound alike and say his fans mistake moaning for singing. And yes, even I felt horror at his shows in recent years upon realizing that all the fans around me - the ones pumping their fists and singing "Prove It All Night" were at an age when they no longer looked as if they could stay up past midnight - probably had a few blue blazers hanging in their closets.

I had met the enemy, and they were Springsteen fans. Worse, I was one of them, complete with blue blazer and 10 p.m. bedtime.

These feelings shoved me into a spiritual desert. My Springsteen lust began to feel like a teenage phase. Lyrics such as "We were prisoners of love, a love in chains," suddenly seemed overwrought.

Psychologically, Springsteen was like a high school boyfriend, remembered fondly, but with some embarrassment. In high school English class, my best friend Lisa and I once had been so caught up in our own private conversation about whether Mary, in the movie version of "Thunder Road" we would one day make, wore a red or a blue dress, that we left class before being dismissed. The English teacher thanked us for our insights with a detention slip.

When "The River" came out, I proposed to some high school friends that we commence weekly Springsteen worship sessions where we would listen to his albums and dissect his often mysterious lyrics. ("Nuns run bald through Vatican halls, pleading immaculate conception." Discuss.) My friends, thank God, gently said no.

I even got up the nerve for my first kiss after a guy named Pete told me he had met Springsteen. For a while, I pondered a life with Pete on the Jersey Shore, but on our first date, Pete buttered his bread with his finger. We didn't work out.

My disillusionment with Springsteen, however, didn't last. When my cousin got me a ticket to his Pete Seeger tribute concert, I fell in love again. The Springsteen of my youth was back, with boisterous orchestrations and tight arrangements after what felt to me like several years of boilerplate pop.

That concert happened about the same time that Nick serenaded me with "Wild Billy's Circus Story." He sealed the deal in an early e-mail by rewriting the lyrics to "The River:"

"I come from down in Philadelphia

where mister when you're young

They bring you up to do like Kenny Gamble done."

Bruce Springsteen is my religion, and, in middle age, I no longer care whether that sentiment is predictable or dull. His lyrics come to my lips more easily than the Apostle's Creed.

At his last Spectrum show Tuesday, I was in the concourse when the harmonica heralded the start of "The River." I sprinted back to my seat. Nick and I danced, the aurora of the Spectrum lights behind us.