We see Henry meet Clare for the first time, and it is a fascinating meeting because she has not only already met him but known him for years, kissed him, and fallen in love with him, and has been awaiting this moment for five years. In fixed time it's a neat predestination paradox (we already had one of these) in which each of them already knows the other when it is the first meeting for the other: when Henry first meets Clare in the Library, she is already in love with him from their trysts in the meadow; when she first meets him in the meadow, he has already met and married her in the future.
That's fine for fixed time, but it doesn't work well for replacement theory, and if we find fixed time troublesome either generally or in this story, we have to find an alternative.
It is awkward at this point to speak of an "original history". Henry has by now made what he describes as "hundreds" of trips, rewriting time repeatedly. Yet at the moment when the artist Clare is referred to the librarian Henry, he has not yet made any trips to that meadow, and so that little girl has not yet met him. She will, in a history yet to be written; but in this history, the first time history gets as far as this meeting, she has not done so. This obviously significantly impacts this meeting. She does not recognize him; she acts naturally for a cute girl meeting a special projects librarian. Then one of two things happens, one of them rather simple and very romantic, and the other extremely complicated and improbable: either they fall in love with each other without that background, or they don't, and their encounters in the past have a lot more impact on them than we guessed.
If they don't, it is still the case that Henry will appear in the woods by the meadow and meet the little girl. He won't know who she is, and won't tell her that he knows her in the future; but he will borrow her blanket and tell her he's a time traveler. Those meetings have a lot of impact on the story and are fodder for the future. After a few of them have been added to the history, though, Clare will know Henry on sight at the library, and that will rewrite history to bring them together.
The notion that they fell in love at that first meeting has much to commend it, though. It is arguably more romantic to have the couple falling in love with each other at the same time. The alternative supposes that she falls in love with him when she is a child, and then when she finds him as an adult she pushes herself on him until he reciprocates that love. Her later claim that he forced himself into her heart cuts both ways in that case, because she in turn forced her way into his, and who can say which came first? Here they meet, both for the first time, and here they come to know and love each other mutually.
To some degree, that time will be erased, and to some degree they will suffer for it. They do not have that courtship to remember, really. She does not know why she fell in love with him then; she knows only that she fell in love with him much younger. He does not have the memories of growing closer together, only of her pressing into his life and insisting that he love her as she loves him. When the marriage counselor asks, "Why did you marry?", they will be hard pressed to give an answer.
For the moment, though, they have that in their relationship, that time of growing together. She discovers his time travel problems not because of his arrivals but because of his departures. It is many rewrites of history before the little girl meets the older man.
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