Love story: May and Dan Cotton understand the ups and downs of young love – literally

It was midsemester when I moved into the dorm. Forgetting it was co-ed, I was headed to the laundry room at midnight with my hair in curlers and wearing my bathrobe when I heard a male voice and dashed back to my room to change, putting on my grungy art smock and dirty jeans.

The elevator opened on the fifth floor, where a young man was in search of a Coke machine that wasn’t empty. As the doors opened, I suddenly realized I was looking at the guy I was going to marry! We rode down together, stopping on each floor until he found his bottle of Coke. Then we went to the basement, where he held the elevator while I ran to pick up my laundry.

Returning to the sixth floor, we said goodnight. After running into each other several times during the next week, we ended up on a double date. Returning to the dorm, we talked in the lobby until being kicked out at 2 a.m. We headed to the elevator where we planned to say goodnight, but we just had so much to talk about that we stayed up all night.

The following day I left for Thanksgiving, inviting Dan to join me, but he declined and stayed in the dorm. We pined for each other all weekend long, and when I returned, our friends began saying we were “joined at the hip.”

We married 18 months later. About 20 years into our marriage, one of our good friends told us that our college gang had been placing bets on how long we would stay married, and no one gave us more than six months! That was 53 years ago.

Before marrying, we made an agreement that even if we could no longer live together, we would never divorce. We continue to believe that, in spite of all the bumps along the road of life, and we are still very much in love.