It wasn't Marty Smith that Cary Wedge gravitated toward at the teen dance they were attending during Christmas break in 1993 in Rochester, Minn., although he turned out to be the one she couldn't do without.
"There was this girl that I didn't like and she was dancing with him and I decided to go over there and kind of get in the way," Cary says. "I didn't really like her and I was just kind of being a pill."
The first time I saw my future spouse:
She says: “I thought he was cute.”
He says: “I was intrigued, I guess at least as much, analytically, as a 15-year-old can be intrigued.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “It was a whirlwind. All of my memories of our wedding day are things like that I popped a seam on my dress and that my mom had to iron my dress in the hallway.
He says: “I just remember it being so surreal.”
My advice for a long happy marriage:
She says: “I think most people let the everyday annoyances and the grind of being married over time build up and they don’t take the time to get counseling or somehow push those things away and get to the root of the problem.”
He says: “I think it boils down to listening and appreciating each other. I think if we hit rough patches it’s usually because we’re not hearing the other person, what their needs are.”
Then she noticed him -- and he was cute.
Cary and Marty went to the same high school in Albert Lea, Minn., an hour away from the bar that was hosting the nonalcoholic teen event that night. She was a junior, he a sophomore and there were more than 300 students in each class and they had not met, but Marty knew that some of his friends knew her.
"I was intrigued," he says. "These guys and I ran in the same circles and we dated a lot of the same girls. Since they were talking to her on the phone I thought she was worth knowing."
The other girl stepped away, giving them a chance to get acquainted.
"We had a connection so we danced to a couple of slow songs," Cary says.
Cary was the captain of the dance team and she had her squad over one night during the break. Marty and three of his friends found out and crashed the party, surprising the girls as well as Cary's parents, who weren't sure what to do about all those boys in their house.
"I do remember her father telling us that he thought it was time for the boys to go home," Marty says.
Cary drove them on their first date -- to the theater to see The Pelican Brief and to dinner -- because Marty wasn't yet 16. On subsequent dates they spent copious amounts of time wandering candy store aisles and watching movies at one of their houses.
"Cary would make me take walks around the lake," says Marty of another of their pastimes.
"He would say, 'Cary, I don't see the point of a walk,'" she recalls.
Marty, she learned, preferred speed to leisurely strolls. She once struggled to keep up with him on rollerblades as he ran three miles to break in new leather boots soaked in water. He wasn't old enough to legally ride his motorcycle on the streets when they started dating, so he took back roads and drove through corn fields to get to her house.
They went to three junior/senior proms together before Cary graduated and left to study graphic arts at South Dakota State University in Brookings, S.D. They broke up then, but got back together before Marty left for the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, Colo., at which point they broke up and got back together again.
After college, Cary moved to Denver, an hour north of the Air Force Academy, to start her career and to be near Marty. He finished at the academy the following year.
"I think that Marty thought that after dating so long on and off that I would expect to get married, so we broke up again," Cary says. "That was eight months, the longest that we had ever broken up over the years. I think it's what was best. We both just needed to live without each other for a while."
Marty was waiting for his assignment to the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla. He and Cary started talking again that fall, unsure what their future held.
Cary was seeing a counselor, working through her feelings about Marty. He joined her and they dutifully completed the counselor's assignments -- talking about or not talking about the problems she suggested -- for two or three months.
"It's weird to go to marriage counseling before you're married but that's essentially what we did," Marty says. "After that, it was clear to me that she was my soul mate and that I was not going to let her go."
He rented a white limousine, put on his dress uniform and went to the agency where Cary was working in February 2001.
"I got so flustered I locked myself out when I got to the door and found him there kneeling on one knee," says Cary, there alone when he arrived.
They were married on Aug. 31, 2001, in the Landmark Center in St. Paul, Minn.
Cary had moved to Pensacola with Marty by then and they returned to Pensacola the day after their wedding for a brief honeymoon on the beach before Marty's next training mission.
"We have lived in three countries, we've moved 10 times," Cary says. "I've been to 20-something countries and Marty has probably been to 40. We've picked up some kids along the way."
Their children -- Ruby, 9, and Gus, 5 -- have visited 19 countries.
They call Little Rock home for now.
"We've had a lot of adventures together," Cary says. "I've been happy to have my same person next to me through all these crazy adventures in life."
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High Profile on 01/07/2018