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Dale Vaughn and Elizabeth Menzel, photographed at Dystopian Studios

*Check out our entire 2013 Couples Issue here

Dale Vaughn, leader of men, and Elizabeth Menzel, leader of women, met playing beach volleyball. Vaughn is the founder of the NextGent men's self-accountability hiking group. Menzel is the founder of the Women's Wisdom Community support group. Right away they sensed each other's awesome energy.

According to Menzel, everything in life is about energy and energy frequencies. Her frequencies matched Vaughn's perfectly. That is, with one small exception: She is old enough to be his mother. (Technically speaking, she is five years younger than his mother.) He was 23 at the time they met. She was 42. They have been together five years now. As they see it, the age difference is not the salient aspect of their relationship.

Though for a while it was. For a while, because of it, there almost was no relationship.

Their volleyball group, organized on Meetup.com, would play for hours, until the sun set. Menzel and Vaughn can't remember exactly when they became aware of one another. She thinks she joined the group before he showed up. He thinks he did. "Probably what was happening was that I was there when he wasn't, and he was there when I wasn't," Menzel says.

"Except I was there every week," Vaughn says. He'd just moved to Los Angeles from Dallas by way of London. "I played every single Saturday," he continues. "It was, like, the thing I did."

Star Foreman

Ritchie and Burton, at home with Phil

*Check out our entire 2013 Couples Issue here

Kate Burton and Michael Ritchie spend a quarter of their time living in different cities, a situation that can be difficult for any couple. But they feel it shows the strength of their relationship. Besides, for the first few days of each trip, they can indulge the habits that drive each other crazy. She can leave copies of the New Yorker around the house, for instance, while he can throw away plastic bags.

"Kate will save plastic bags from the grocery, and we'll have 80 of them," Ritchie says, in a voice that meshes his Worcester, Mass., accent with the nasality of Ray Romano. "There's not going to be a moment when we have to pack 80 plastic bags. Can we go down to 10?"

The couple sits in the living room of their impossibly charming though surprisingly low-key house on a narrow, curvy road in Los Feliz. The front door and garage door are a matching light blue, and there's a yard out back, where Ritchie's domain is the potted plants and Burton oversees the garden. Running around somewhere is their excitable lab mix, Phil.

That "surprisingly" is because of their high-profile careers. Ritchie is artistic director at L.A.'s powerhouse Center Theatre Group, which controls three stages, the Ahmanson, Mark Taper Forum and Kirk Douglas, and regularly prepares shows for Broadway. Burton is one of the country's most celebrated theater actresses, once earning two Tony nominations in the same year (2002), for Hedda Gabler and The Elephant Man.

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Shawn Chapman Holley and her husband, Dorian, photographed at Kulak's Woodshed

*Check out our entire 2013 Couples Issue here

One Friday afternoon a few years ago, just as lawyer Shawn Chapman Holley dropped some highly confidential paperwork discussing her client's alleged illicit activities through the mail slot of a lavish home in the hills, she realized she had the wrong address.

Panicked, she decided that protecting the dirty secrets of Lindsay or Paris or Snoop — all of whom she has defended, none of whom she is willing to confirm as the celebrity in this story — meant waiting for the people to come home and convincing them to give her back the documents.

She called home to tell her husband that she wouldn't make it back in time for dinner.

"Next thing I know," Shawn remembers, "he shows up" — with burgers, fries and orange soda, braving torrential rain to wait with her.

And wait. And wait.

"We were there so long I had to pee in the Jack in the Box cup and pour it out in the rain," says Dorian Holley, laughing. Now that's love.

For years, you've seen this spunky, tireless litigator and her genial, bald clotheshorse of a husband standing behind the rich and famous. She does it on CNN and TMZ as an attorney to the stars; he does it on MTV and NBC, where he is currently lead vocalist in The Tonight Show band. (He's also a former American Idol vocal coach.)

Enumerating the full list of celebs these two have supported legally and vocally could take days. She's defended O.J. Simpson and Nicole Richie; he's sung with Jessica Simpson and Lionel Richie. And while many of their clients gallivant, self-medicate and stumble around insular bubbles of fame, the hardworking and humble Holleys somehow have managed to make an honest living amidst the razzle-dazzle of Tinseltown.

Star Foreman

*Check out our entire 2013 Couples Issue here

Marissa Lopez and Gil Gastelum's broad kitchen table, covered with a brightly colored oilcloth and set with a fresh basket of pan dulce, is the heart of their Arleta home. For one hour each night, it's also their refuge.

"She doesn't allow phones when we're eating," Gastelum says.

"I tell him, 'It's one hour,' " Lopez explains, looking at her husband with an affectionate smile. "You need that for your sanity."

Aside from dinnertime, Lopez, 33, and Gastelum, 42, keep a less conventional schedule — late nights at clubs and regular trips out of town. It comes with the territory: Lopez is director of writer-publisher relations at performance-rights organization Broadcast Music Inc., which means coordinating and attending frequent songwriter showcases and performances. Gastelum, who owns the indie label and musician-management company Cosmica Management & Records, also attends shows several times a week with his artists — acts including La Santa Cecilia, Maria Del Pilar, Charanga Cakewalk, Carla Morrison and Gaby Moreno.

Sometimes, if they're lucky, Lopez and Gastelum end up at the same show.

Star Foreman

Bermudez, left, and Rabe at Bermudez Projects

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John Rabe, 46, and Julian Bermudez, 38, met at the close of a sunny day in Malibu in 2001, when separate afternoons spent sunbathing on the shores of El Matador beach led both to the Friendship on West Channel Road. The nautical-themed watering hole, one of L.A. County's oldest gay bars, was a popular alternative to the club-heavy scene in West Hollywood, Rabe recalls. You could go just to talk, not necessarily to hook up.

Established in 1937, the bar's history ran deep — most of the structure had been ruined in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, but the original old keel, salvaged from a shipwreck in the 1930s, remained over the bar, carved with the names of men who'd shared drinks there. By the time the bar closed a few years ago, most of the names had been painted over in white — a ritual memorial to customers who'd died.

Long before Rabe and Bermudez met, Christopher Isherwood, who lived nearby in Santa Monica Canyon, depicted the landmark affectionately in his novel A Single Man, "down on the corner of the ocean highway, across from the beach, its round green porthole lights shining to welcome you."

Rabe bought Bermudez a $1 burger, and they were a half-hour into their first chat when the friend Bermudez had arrived with decided he was ready to go home. Rabe insisted that Bermudez give him his number first. "And don't give me a fake one," he said.

Bermudez's friend warned him not to get involved with the tall Midwesterner. He was obviously a hustler, he cautioned. But Bermudez ignored him. "You have a bad track record with boys in general," he thought. "I'm not going to follow your advice. I'll go with my gut."

The men dated exclusively from the beginning. Eleven years later and now happily married, "It's the world's longest hustle," Rabe jokes.

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Scheer and Raphael, on the phone

*Check out our entire 2013 Couples Issue here

June Diane Raphael and her husband, Paul Scheer, make fun of bad Hollywood movies. They're also in them, occasionally, but why should that stop the mockery?

The couple's wildly popular podcast, How Did This Get Made, co-hosted with actor Jason Mantzoukas, attracts some 150,000 listeners per episode. It was also the readers' choice for best podcast in L.A. Weekly's 2012 Web Awards.

Over the course of an hour, films with bloated budgets and underconsidered plots — think Twilight, Wild Wild West and Barb Wire — get thoroughly dissected, their bad acting, garish set design and gaping plot holes pondered with great seriousness.

"We have a really joyful appreciation for bad movies," Raphael says.