True Romance: More than 50 years together started with a year apart.

Back in 1962, a logistical issue or two got in the way of Mike Maus dropping on one knee to propose to Coralinn Tuttle.

First, he was stationed in Germany and she was attending college in New Jersey. Maybe he could have popped the question from the only phone on his floor of the bachelor officers’ quarters. But, he recalls, overseas calls cost a nickel a second.

So he wrote her a letter and enclosed an engagement ring.

“He’s very good with letters,” Coralinn says.

“I can write,” says Mike matter-of-factly. “I thought it was a very good letter. I was very much in love. All you had to do was express that and away you went.”

She said yes, obviously, but she wouldn’t put the ring on her finger until she talked to him.

“He could have been out in the field,” she says. “I didn’t really know. It wasn’t instantaneous speaking as we have now. It was leaving a trail of messages.”

There’s something romantic about that, isn’t there? There was no tweeting their engagement to the world. No Facebook posts with a million likes. No texting emoticons to each other. It was just two young people an ocean apart, linked by that letter and dozens of others exchanged during the year.

They’d met a couple of years earlier on a blind date. Mike was a senior at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where Coralinn’s father was dean of the military psychology and leadership department. She was a high school senior.

They were, Mike

Article source: http://www.dallasnews.com/lifestyles/headlines/20150102-true-romance-more-than-50-years-together-started-with-a-year-apart..ece