Jerry Rhein had been registered with the free online dating website PlentyOf-Fish for at least a year. He'd been diligent, but he'd not found one profile eye-catching enough to warrant his response. Not a single one, when he came across Roberta Sheppard Peterson's.
"I liked what she had written," he says, "and I liked her looks."
The first time I saw my future spouse:
He says: “No real sparks flew or anything like that, but I noticed a lovely lady with a joyful smile and a great personality.”
She says: “I really liked his smile.”
I knew he/she was the one for me:
He says: “I realized it was comfortable to be with her.”
She says: “Maybe, sort of, when he gave me that honey.”
On our wedding day:
He says: “I did bee work that morning and she did some wedding stuff, and then I met her at the church later that day and we got married.”
She says: “We had fun.”
Roberta had been on the website longer than Jerry, and she had met a few men, but "I was ready to quit doing it because some of the guys I met I just wasn't too impressed with."
Jerry, who is 65, sent Roberta, 72, a note through the dating site in February 2013. Chemistry developed over a plate of pasta with shrimp and a pizza at Boston's Restaurant and Sports Bar in Little Rock.
"He's about as Southern as I am a Yankee. I'm from New Jersey. And we just kind of talked about that. He's always happy, and I am, too. We're both very optimistic. It's nice when you can just go out with somebody and laugh and have a good time."
Through the course of conversation, Roberta and Jerry discovered each had lost a son. Roberta's son, David, died in 2004 and Jerry's son, Jason, died in 2008. As they were leaving the restaurant Jerry, a beekeeper, gave Roberta a jar of fresh honey and told her about his hobby. He had no idea how sweet she would consider his gift.
Her son, she explained, had been emphatic about not harming bees and had showed her how to pick them up by their wings and move them from inside her home to the great outdoors without anyone getting hurt.
"When David died, there were all these little, tiny honeybees at the funeral and one of them landed on the flowers that I had in my hand. I felt like that was just a sign from David that he was OK," Roberta says. "I felt like I was in The Twilight Zone when Jerry gave me that jar of honey. It just really surprised me. I never expected that. It just felt like we were supposed to meet. I have a strong faith, and I feel like maybe our [late] sons brought us together, that maybe our sons talked to God and had something to do with that."
Right after their first date, Jerry left for Columbus, Ohio, to visit his daughter. Roberta didn't know he was gone and simply wondered why she hadn't heard from him.
"He was the only one that I met on PlentyOfFish that I liked and then I didn't hear from him, so I kind of wondered. I sent him a note and asked him if I had had spinach in my teeth," she says.
He returned, and they started seeing each other regularly, hiking at Pinnacle Mountain and hoofing it across the Big Dam Bridge. He took her to his family reunion in Stuttgart and introduced her to his bee hives. "I was terrified, but I was brave," she says.
Roberta, a substitute teacher in the Little Rock School District, is also a master gardener. After they dated for about five months, Jerry, an aircraft inspector at Central Flying Service, built a fence around the garden at her house.
He lived in Austin, so to avoid a long drive home and back he sometimes stayed overnight at her house. "In the guest room," she says. "There was no hanky-panky going on."
So it was natural for him to stay with her around the time she was to have hip replacement in March. Jerry brought his parrot and cockatiel with him then, making a menagerie out of her home, which already included two dogs, a cat and eight fish.
After her recovery, neither of them was ready for Jerry to move back to his house. "I told him, 'I love you, and I know you love me, but if I'm not the woman you want to spend the rest of your life with, you need to take your parrot and your cockatiel and go find what you want,'" she says.
Two weeks later, on May 17, they exchanged their wedding vows at Kingdom Truth Builders in Little Rock.
Roberta and Jerry have been married before, and each has raised children and welcomed grandchildren. Finding each other was an unexpected bonus.
"We had a fun wedding," Roberta says. "Everything we do is fun. We love God, I think that's the main thing. And we love each other. I really, really believe that this was meant to happen. I believe that we were meant to be."
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High Profile on 08/24/2014