I love a good love story. This right here? This is a good love story.
And maybe my favorite part of a good love story is how two lives, moving in completely different directions, intersect, always at just the right moment, to make the love story work. What was going on in each person’s individual lives right before they became a couple. How fate brought them together.
About two years ago right now, in the beginning of September 2017, Amy Long was 39 years old, successful, the longtime associate director of fraternity and sorority life at the University of Kansas, living in Lawrence. She had made the decision at the end of her thirty-eighth year to start exploring ways to become a mom – she did intrauterine insemination (IUI) procedures and eventually felt a calling on her heart to become a foster parent, and then, hopefully, adopt out of foster care. In August 2017, just one month before she met the love of her life who – in addition to his love – would give her the love of four children, she was attending a course one night a week to become an adoptive parent. Right smack dab in the middle of that, she met a guy named Jeff Schell on Tinder.
Jeff, for his part, was successful as well, a restauranteur, entrepreneur, and owner of the popular North Star Steakhouse in Topeka, about 25 minutes west of Lawrence, the home of KU. (Interestingly enough, I am from Topeka but lived in Lawrence for four years as a KU student, so I am very familiar – very familiar – with the I-70 drive from Topeka to Lawrence and back again.) When he met Amy, he had been divorced for about a year and a half and was ready to start at least meeting people. He wasn’t really looking for anything serious when he and Amy matched on Tinder. Amy reached out first on the app, and they talked a little bit before they met up on September 17, 2017 for their first date.
Amy, a single woman looking to become a mom, thought on September 17, 2017 that she knew what she wanted her life to look like.
Today, in September 2019, it looks absolutely nothing like the picture she had painted in her head. The good news? It’s better than she could have ever imagined, and within four months Amy went from being single to a wife and a bonus mother of four beautiful children.
***
The spot chosen for their first date on that Sunday night was Free State Brewing Company, one of the most popular restaurants on Lawrence’s most popular street, Massachusetts Street – or, as people who know the town call it, Mass Street. Pretty much all of the hottest restaurants and bars in the college town are on Mass. Amy showed up first to Free State and tucked herself into a little corner booth. She watched Jeff, her future husband but, as of this moment, just some Tinder guy she’d swiped right on, walk in the restaurant.
“I thought ‘Oh crap, I’m in trouble,’” she said. “He was a lot cuter in person. And they’re normally not.”
Jeff saw Amy and remembers breaking out into a big smile.
“Amy just had on the biggest smile in the world,” he said. “She lights up a room. I thought ‘Oh wow, I hope that’s her.’”
It was. The date was easy, Amy said – a lot of fun. Jeff remembers it as a whirlwind. They walked out of the restaurant holding hands, and 30 seconds after they left Free State, they kissed for the first time.
“I wasn’t shy,” Jeff said. “It felt right.”
They moved from Free State to the Bourgeois Pig, where, as they drank cocktails together, others in the bar were shocked they’d just met. They thought, based off of their rapport around each other, they’d been together for months. It was true, they both say – they instantly were comfortable around each other.
Jeff invited Amy to come to a liquor tasting at a local casino that he was already going to for his restaurant. Within 10 minutes of their arrival, Jeff – a prankster – was telling people they had just gotten married.
“I just wanted to see her expression,” he said. “And yes, it scared the hell out of her.”
Amy had her guard up already – she wasn’t really planning on getting serious with anyone right now. Her main focus was the adoption process she hoped to see come to pass. Jeff told Amy on their first date that he had four kids. By their third date, Jeff introduced Amy to his other family – his family at the restaurant – and Amy panicked.
“Once I met the [restaurant] staff, it became kind of serious for me, and it scared me,” Amy said. “I ended up breaking up with him a week later. The first week of October, he reached out and we were generically talking about getting together this week. I had adoption class that night, and I just kind of panicked. I couldn’t rationalize that I could make these two dreams work together – the dream of having a partner and becoming a parent, because they came to me so separately.”
She told Jeff that she couldn’t do this right now. Even though their relationship was young, the breakup crushed Jeff. He wouldn’t give up. He emailed her about how upset he was, and how he wished she would consider otherwise. Amy spent the weekend with her girlfriends, who could tell immediately that she was upset. Her girlfriends told her to not call Jeff right now, to wait until the weekend was over. So, on Sunday, Amy reached out to him. They had dinner that week and decided to get back together after that.
“This person was someone who loved being around me and celebrated me, and I loved being around him,” Amy said. “I didn’t have to put on any sort of airs or pretend to be less than. I knew, if I came back, I was going to put everything into it – give it a real shot and see where it was going to go. It was a huge leap of faith to figure it out.”
Not only did she have to apologize to Jeff, but she had to apologize to the restaurant staff, too, who had been forced to deal with a downtrodden Jeff since the breakup.
“I made them a cobbler to apologize,” Amy said.
And three months later, Jeff, 40, and Amy, 39, got married.
***
Around Christmas 2017, Amy not only met Jeff’s kids – who, at that time, were 17, 12, seven, and two – but also the mother of Jeff’s three youngest kids, Jessica. Amy really wanted to meet Jessica before she met the kids, and so she did the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Jeff was nervous, but Amy and Jessica hit it off instantly, drinking wine, talking, and getting along well. They said in another situation – and, hell, maybe even this one – they could see themselves being friends. The next step was to meet the kids. Thanks to knowing who Selena Gomez was, Amy was a hit.
“I earned points on that,” Amy said.
She told Jeff around this time that she could probably see herself getting married at some point. They didn’t have any immediate plans to do so – maybe within the year – but she was open to it. When Amy went home to Illinois for the holidays, she told her parents she’d met someone that she was probably going to marry.
“My mom said to me ‘Please don’t run away and get married,’” Amy said. “I said ‘Okay, deal, we’ll have a wedding.’”
Jeff moved in with Amy in Lawrence on January 1, 2018. And, to everyone’s surprise – even their own – one week later, on January 8, the two became husband and wife.
***
On January 6, Jeff and Amy went to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, which, according to Jeff and Amy’s friends, is apparently the third most popular place to get married, only behind Las Vegas and Hawaii. The reason? You can get married in about 20 minutes in Eureka Springs. They slept on it and decided on the second day to get married. They went and picked out rings, and while they were picking out jewelry, the two noticed there was a psychic convention taking place. They had their cards read, and there was only one red card in the whole stack of cards. Some people weren’t going to be happy with them eloping, the cards said, but they went with their gut anyway.
That Monday morning, they woke up, asked what they needed to do to get a marriage license, and came back and got married. It took about 30 minutes for the whole shebang, including getting a legal marriage certificate. Amy was in jeans and a dressy top. It was laid back. It was them.
Jeff and Amy told the kids, Jessica, and Jeff’s mom that they had eloped. They held off on telling Amy’s parents until March, when he met them for the first time. Her parents knew they were engaged, but not that they were married.
When her parents came to Kansas to visit, Jeff and Amy took them to the restaurant, since it was such a big part of their lives. One of the regulars at the North Star came up to Jeff and Amy and was upset she hadn’t been told.
“You got married and didn’t say anything!” she said.
Amy looked her, deadpan, and said “Stop.”
But she wouldn’t.
“How long ago did you get married?” she went on, clearly having had a little too much to drink.
“I looked at her like ‘Judy, stop talking,’” Amy said.
Then Judy realized that Amy’s parents didn’t yet know. Despite finding out in, well, a less than desirable way, they were great, Amy said.
“We weren’t exactly sure how to tell them…” Jeff said, “…and Judy did it for us,” Amy said, finishing his sentence. Now, everyone gets along well, a big, blended family. Amy wanted to be a mother in the days leading up to their first date so badly – and within four months of knowing Jeff, she became a bonus mom to four children.
Sometimes in life, we undersell ourselves, when life has every intention of quadrupling our best laid plans.
***
On September 17, 2018 – one year to the day after their first date at Free State – the Schells moved to Topeka, five minutes away from Jessica and the kids. They’re so close now that the kids pop in and hang out all the time, even though Jeff and Amy only have the kids half the time.
“Fun chaos is what we call it,” Amy said. “I brought a dog to the marriage. He brought four kids. My friends say ‘Amy, remember when you were single talking about having a family, and here you are, married with a family.’ I went from one completely different life to another in three and a half months. I wouldn’t go back, let’s put it that way.”
That’s not to say that her new life didn’t come without adjustment. The realization that her life is no longer her own hit hard and fast. She had gotten used to her demanding job working with college students, which took up most of her time.
“There was some learning for me, some adjusting to coming home at night and having three young kids around,” she said. “One has soccer practice, one is on YouTube, one is running around without shoes on, coloring on whatever they can find. After a year of marriage and almost two years together – figuring it out has been awesome.”
It’s not at all what she would have expected from her life, she said – it’s better.
“It’s better than I could have written,” Amy said. “You make plans and God laughs. There was a reason I wasn’t able to get pregnant through the IUI process, and the reason was, a few months later, God brought Jeff into my life. I wasn’t at all expecting to meet someone. I was in a selfish place, thinking I only had one path to be a parent. I would tell myself at my lowest point to not be so rigid in my dreams, to not worry about it so much. It seems hard, if you want something so bad, you want it right now and you want it a certain way.”
She laughs when she thinks about a friend of hers who made a list of what she wanted her future husband to be – what she wanted him to look like, in particular. One thing that was a “dealbreaker” for her was height – no men less than 6’ tall need apply. The man she ended up married to? He is 5’10’’.
“But everything else about him was off the charts,” Amy said. “She had to let go of that. What’s most important is the connection, and that can’t be forced. It’s going to come when you least expect it. That’s the truth, too – it sounds cliché, but it’s true. I don’t know why I put myself on Tinder, but I’m glad I did. I’m glad I agreed to get out of my own way a little bit, to go on a date, to go on a path going in a different direction, because it turned out to be what I needed. Here I am with four incredible children, one who is washing his plastic house next to us right now. I have a great partner. It’s not perfect, but we’re living a really good life together.”
Jeff said had he not gone through the pain of his divorce he wouldn’t appreciate Amy as much as he does.
“We both had to meet exactly when we did for it to work,” he said.
Amy, who is from Illinois, lived in Oregon for many years before taking a leap of faith in 2009 and moving to Kansas. It took her another eight years in the Sunflower State before she met Jeff.
“It happened at the exact right time,” Jeff said.
Amy agrees – she and Jeff never would have worked if they had met when she was in her twenties. She needed to get that wandering spirit out, which she did during her years on the west coast.
“It looks nothing like I thought it would,” she said. “But it’s better. Even better than I thought it would be. It comes down to timing.”
Jeff and Amy don’t have any plans to further expand their family, she said. They’ve talked about it several different times, but their family – with kids now ranging in age from four to 19 – feels complete.
“I think we are good,” Amy said. “We’ve got to raise these kids up and get them through and get their lives in a good place. The thought of bringing a fifth into the chaos might be too much. You can be a mom without birthing children.”
***
On October 13, 2018, 10 months after eloping, Jeff and Amy were married in a ceremony in front of their family and friends at The Brownstone in Topeka. They’re settled into their new lives together, Jeff running a successful restaurant and Amy still living out her passion as a Greek life professional at KU. They have the kids part time, which leaves them time to continually focus on their careers, their marriage, and even have some peace and quiet when the kids are away. It looks nothing like what Amy envisioned for herself two years ago today but being a wife and a mother – and going from being single to so much overabundance of love – was worth it, Amy said. It works out, somehow, she said – it always works out. And for that, she is grateful.
Their love story is a story of two lives, moving in completely different directions, that intersected, at just the right moment, to make the love story work – a love story that far supersedes anything she could have dreamed up for herself.
“It was absolutely worth the wait,” she said. “I never thought this would be my life. I love it so much more than I ever could have imagined.”