High School Sweethearts Wait 68 Years To Get Married

It might be too early in the week for this one.

Bawling your eyes out halfway through a Monday work day may get your boss to call in the men with the butterfly nets, but trust me when I say it's worth it. Without further ado:

Carl King and Dorothy Stallings dated at their Waco high school back in the 1940s. Two years after coming back from WWII, King apparently called it off and left town to get married to another woman. In the years since, Stallings waited patiently for him to realize his mistake, never marrying...

“No one ever measured up to him,” she said. “I knew how much he cared for me.”

When King’s wife died in 2007, Stallings got in touch with King.

“I knew he was hurting and I wrote and told him if there was anything I could do I’d be glad to help, and sometimes it just helps to have someone to talk to,” she said.

King and Stallings started talking on the phone, and she would occasionally write letters.

In Houston for Christmas that year, Stallings said she asked if she could visit him in League City, where he was staying with one of his daughters, but he said he didn’t think it was a good idea.

On Easter in 2008, she asked again.

Stallings recalled telling King “ ‘there are some things I want to say, and I want to say them in person, not over the phone.’ ”

King agreed to the visit.

“We talked for four or five hours and didn’t even take time for lunch,” she said. “We started talking, and we said that there wasn’t a day that passed when we didn’t think of each other.”

Two months later King visited Stallings in Waco.

“He’s been coming from time to time, and each time he’s stayed longer,” she said. “And then five weeks ago he proposed to me.” [Waco Tribune]

When they were married Saturday afternoon, the minister forgot the part about kissing the bride. As the couple made their way up the aisle, the weeping guests called out for a do-over. Hence the above photo.

Via.