The Cougills, Indianapolis, Ind.
Donna and Joe were high school sweethearts, each other’s first love. But after finding out they were pregnant in 1968, Donna’s parents made her give up the baby for adoption and forbade the couple from speaking. And they didn’t for more than 50 years. That was until June 2019, when their daughter found Donna through the genetic profiling service 23andMe. “Hi Joe, I got your name from Donna,” Joe recalls the text reading. “I don’t know how to gently lob this to you, but I think you’re my biological father.” Eventually all three met. “She said she wanted to know the facts of her birth,” Donna says. “If it was something horrible, she would just accept that and move on. But she found that actually, she was born out of love. And there was never a question about that.” Less than a year after being reconnected, Joe, 69, and Donna, 70, were married. “Donna and I had a little over 50 years of life that happened to us apart, and now our goal is to spend the rest of our lives together,” says Joe.
The Konopkens, Phoenix, Ariz.
One Saturday morning in 1982, Yolanda was swimming laps at the YMCA in San Jose when Joel Konopken jumped into her lane and collided with her. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, so he could hardly see, but “the issue was that he was a poor swimmer,” Yolanda clarifies to this day. “He should have been in the slow area.” “Sitting there with his arms around the side of the pool, he was being friendly and wanted to talk to me, and I kept saying, ‘You need to go to the other lane, you have to follow the rules around here.’” Somehow, in between laps and Yolanda’s scolding, racquetball came up. Both of them needed a partner, so they exchanged phone numbers, and their first 10 dates were all games—they found they were more compatible on dry land. Joel, now 68, and Yolanda, now 69, married just one year later.
The Leibers and The Abrams, Philadelphia, Pa.
Frenemies as youngsters, Chuck Leiber, 82, and Marvin Abrams, 82, knew of each other growing up. The young men were from the same North Philadelphia neighborhood, joined different chapters of AZA, a Jewish youth fraternal organization, and faced off on the baseball field throughout the years. Lucky for them, their future wives, Debbie, 80, and Toby, 80, were themselves friends since kindergarten. But this isn’t just a story of family interconnectedness, it’s one of building friendships. Chuck married Debbie in 1964 and 11 days later was supposed to report for military duty. “It was horrendous,” Chuck said, about the tearful goodbye he would have to give his new bride. “When I went down to the transport, they gave us lunch, and I couldn’t even get ice cream down.” This is the point when former frenemy Marvin steps in to save the day (and the families’ future legacy). Marvin (“in his infinite ability to know people,” Chuck says) pulled a general aside and said, “‘Look at these two young lovebirds, they deserve to be together,’” Chuck recalls. Marvin convinced the Army to let Chuck stay home with his new wife a little while longer, “which turned into 60 years.” And as history would have it, 25 years later, their youngest son, Josh, met Marvin and Toby’s youngest daughter, Mindi. They’ve been together ever since—and the rest, as they say, is history. So was everything before, and all that’s happened since. “The nicest part about all this is that we’ve remained friends all these years,” Chuck says. “That’s the nicest part about all this—what Marvin was able to do for us back then, and how it’s since blossomed.”
