Brent Gourley's family gave him the choice of a new 10-speed bike or a trip to the Orange Bowl. He chose the bike.
While his family was away, Brent, then 10, stayed with his friend, Eddie. He had met Eddie's little sister, Lynnette Thomas, before that.
"I would go over and spend the night at his house so I'm sure we had met as kids," he says of Lynnette. "But this time that we saw each other was monumental."
Brent brought a tin of flavored popcorn with him, which Lynnette really liked.
"We played games and did stuff together that weekend," says Brent of his earliest interactions with the woman he would marry almost two decades later.
Brent and Lynnette grew up in Cherokee Village and went to school in Highland. They played together on the elementary school playground -- including a few rounds of kiss chase. In high school, Lynnette was a cheerleader and Brent was an athlete.
"Growing up we were told to pray for our friends and I would pray for him separately, though I didn't know I was praying for him -- I was praying for my husband, whoever that was going to be," Lynnette says. "But we never dated."
After graduation in 1985, Brent went to the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville and Lynnette left for Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia.
"Somehow I saw a picture of her bulletin board in her dorm room, and she had up a picture of her two brothers -- and me," Brent says.
He was dating someone at the time, and so was she.
In 1989, Lynnette married a guy from their tiny high school, and Brent -- a friend of both -- was an usher in the wedding. Lynnette and her husband lived briefly in Waco, Texas, and then moved to Little Rock.
"I got a job, and part of my job was letting people I couldn't see through a gate," she says. "They would just buzz and say what company they were with and I would let them through."
Unbeknownst to her, one of the people she let through was Brent, then a vendor working with her employer. She had lost track of him, but they reconnected after seeing each other in the hall. Lynnette and her husband had Brent over for dinner and they all went out to BJ's Star Studded Honky Tonk for some two-stepping.
Lynnette and her husband moved to Jacksonville, Fla., after that, and they lost touch with Brent.
A year or two later, Brent found out from Lynnette's brother, Wilson, who had moved to Little Rock in the interim, that Lynnette and her husband had divorced.
"Brent called me when he heard, just to ask if I was OK," she says.
She was, she told him. She stayed in Jacksonville after their divorce, fighting the urge to run home to Arkansas.
"I just wanted to be single on my own, and go out to eat by myself and go to the movies by myself and just make sure I was OK by myself," she says.
She and Brent rekindled their friendship and began writing letters -- he jokes that hers were more like books. They occasionally exchanged calls, too, always waiting until late evening when the long-distance rates dropped.
Several months in, they realized there might be something deeper to their lifelong friendship.
In 1994, Lynnette returned Little Rock for a better job. Brent was managing a small apartment complex in Little Rock then, and there happened to be a vacancy when Lynnette needed one.
"I moved into one upstairs and he was in the next building over, downstairs," Lynnette says. "And we were able to actually just spend time together. We never called it dating."
Brent, though, started to feel intimidated by their evolving relationship -- and Lynnette backed off.
"She went out with a pharmacist, and for whatever reason, it bothered me that she went out with somebody else," Brent says. "I was thinking, 'We're not even dating. Why is this bothering me?'"
Lynnette and Brent started a weekly tradition, getting together to watch new episodes of "Friends," and they would go to church and a singles group together.
As time went on, Brent felt a pull to make "spending time together" a formal commitment.
"It was almost like I just heard, 'Lynnette is your wife,'" he says.
In April 1996, he popped the question.
"He said, 'Don't you think it's about time that we started looking for those round things that go around your finger?'" Lynnette says.
Lynnette, who thinks she may have loved him from the beginning, said simply, "OK."
They were married six weeks later, on June 22, 1996, at Indian Hills Baptist Church in North Little Rock.
The Gourleys live in North Little Rock with their 18-year-old daughter, Erica. Their daughter Bethanie, 23, lives in Fayetteville.
Brent has realized in the years since he missed the Orange Bowl that he was set up.
"They only bought four tickets. They knew I was going to fall for the new bike," he says.
Since that was the weekend his friendship with Lynnette took root, he figures that's OK.
"I love our story," Brent says. "I love her."
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One of the first times I remember seeing my future spouse:
She says: “He was driving the car — I think he had just finished football practice — and I went up to him and he told me how beautiful my hair was. But I was getting it cut and permed that day.”
He says: “We were just kids. We were probably just 7 or 8 when we first saw each other, just around.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “I hyperventilated as I was coming down the aisle. I think it was just overwhelming that I was actually going to marry Brent.”
He says: “I started crying when I saw my ex-girlfriend. It’s kind of hard to explain but I realized if we hadn’t broken up I wouldn’t have been ready to marry my wife.”
My advice for a long happy marriage:
She says: “Marry your best friend.”
He says: “It’s one day at a time.”