In the fall of 2017, Marc Showalter and Leslie Banahan had known one another for 30 years. In those three decades, they had played many roles in each other’s lives: Colleagues. Supervisor and supervisee. Friends. Then best friends. Teammates. Confidantes. For the entirety of their 30-year friendship, at least one of them was married to someone else. When they met in 1987, Marc was single, but Leslie was already married. When Marc married in 2009, Leslie, his best friend, threw him an engagement party. Three years later, Leslie and her husband of 40 years separated, and their divorce was finalized two years later in 2014. They were never single at the same time, and even if they were, Marc said he didn’t think he had a chance in hell with a woman of Leslie’s caliber. When Marc and his wife separated in 2016, after having that devastating conversation with his former wife, the one where they decided that this was it, Leslie was the first person Marc called – not because he had some stark realization that he loved her and wanted to be with her, but because Leslie was the truest friend he had and gave the best, most sound, reasonable advice.
If you would have told Marc Showalter and Leslie Banahan three years ago that today, in the spring of 2020, they’d have just celebrated their first wedding anniversary and, in their mid-sixties, they’d both be the happiest they’d ever been, they would have both laughed uproariously in your face.
But then – that night.
Marc and Leslie have many shared interests. One of them is taking long walks. For over 30 years, Marc and Leslie have walked together, sometimes just the two of them, sometimes in a larger group. (When I worked at Ole Miss with both Marc and Leslie about 10 or so years ago, I can remember seeing them walking all the time in the Grove, or in the Circle, so deep in conversation that it was as if it were only the two of them in the world.) One night that fall, Marc and Leslie took a walk around Leslie’s neighborhood, like they had done 100 times before. Halfway through the walk, Leslie’s heart skipped a beat. What is going on with me? she thought. This is weird. This is awkward.
Almost always after these long walks, Leslie would invite her best friend in for a glass of water. This particular night, the World Series was on – the Astros versus the Dodgers – and both Marc and Leslie are huge baseball fans. But, when they reached her front door, Leslie didn’t invite him in. She just said goodnight. It was awkward – really, Leslie said, the only awkward moment in their 30-plus years of friendship. She shut the door and knew that it would never be the same between them.
Marc came over another night to watch one of the final games of the World Series. He reached over and held Leslie’s hand. Leslie said it felt like a bad romance novel: There was electricity. Sparks. Her heart was pounding.
“Then we kissed,” she said. “And what I say is, we found our way home.”
***
For all of that romance in 2017, Leslie doesn’t even remember meeting Marc in 1987 when both worked together in student affairs at the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss. Marc’s last name is Showalter; for the longest time, she thought his first name was Walter. Or Walt. Something like that. She couldn’t get his name right for almost the entire first year they knew each other. (Leslie, who had already been married for quite some time when they met, blames that slipup on having two young kids, working full-time, and going to graduate school part-time. Fair point.)
But Marc remembers everything about the moment he met Leslie.
“I remember being struck by her presence,” he said. “I thought she was beautiful, and she made my heart skip a beat. It was more I was struck with what an attractive person she was and how pleasant she was to me. I was drawn into that. I didn’t think in any way this is the person I’ll spend the rest of my life with.”
Back then Marc was a graduate student at Ole Miss and working in the Counseling Center; Leslie at that time was working with international students. It was a fairly brief initial interaction, but, due to their roles, both of them often ended up working together on crisis response, often showing up at the emergency room at the same time in the middle of the night to tend to a student in trouble. That’s how they began to get to know each other – in the wee hours of the morning, in the middle of a crisis situation.
“What I quickly learned about Marc is he always made the situation better,” Leslie said. “Some people can make a crisis worse because they get anxious and overreact and elevate the emotion in the room. Marc had a real way of deescalating a bad situation, and I grew to really trust his judgement. If I’ve got to go to the hospital at 3 a.m. and deal with a suicide attempt, he was the person I wanted there with me. I felt like we made a good team and we made good decisions together. That’s really how we got to know each other.”
Though Marc remained a bachelor into his fifties, Leslie was then happily married. It was purely platonic. They’d travel together for business, present together at conferences, and go to Ole Miss women’s basketball games together, sometimes just the two of them, sometimes with others. Marc taught Leslie’s son how to play golf and would watch her daughter play basketball when she was in high school. They always had an ease together – a natural comfortability that was hard to ignore. After they’d present together at conferences, conference attendees would ask if they were married. Yes, they’d say, but not to each other! They became best friends.
In 1996, Leslie became the assistant vice chancellor at Ole Miss – and Marc’s boss. In 1999, Leslie left Ole Miss and went to work at the University of Georgia, where she was the assistant vice president for student affairs there. After five years in Athens, Ga., Leslie and her husband moved back to Oxford, Miss., and when her old position at Ole Miss came open again in 2007, she was asked by the then vice chancellor to apply for it, a job she took and kept until her retirement in May 2019. (I worked with Leslie quite frequently when I worked in Greek affairs at Ole Miss – she was my boss’ boss’ boss, or something like that. Leslie has a stoic, regal quality that I can only describe as magical. I also worked with Marc some, though less often, and always found him to be affable, sweet, and one of the kindest souls I’ve ever met.)
In 2012, Leslie’s first husband told her that he wanted a divorce. She was 59, and stunned. They had been married for nearly 40 years, since she was 20 years old. They’d led a pretty happy life, raised two kids, and she couldn’t remember life before their marriage. Now, at nearly 60, she was starting over. She said then, in 2012, the prospect of living alone for the first time in her entire life felt daunting and terrifying. Now, she calls it an incredible gift. As she began building her life as a single woman, she got asked out by a few men, but turned them all down. No, no, no, she said. I don’t want to date. I don’t know how. She had her friends, including her best friend, Marc, who told her over oatmeal cookies at the Rebel Market that she could and would get through this. She had a good job and a solid retirement plan. What did she need a man for?
***
In 1997, Marc became the director of the Counseling Center at Ole Miss, a job he never expected to have – he was happy just being a counselor, not the captain of the ship – but ended up in for the next 18 years. By now, Leslie was not just his best friend but was his boss. It was never a weird dynamic, their mixture of friendship and supervisor/supervisee. As with everything about the two of them, the flow was natural and the hang was easy. By the end of his career Marc left his role as director – in his words, he was never cut out to be an administrator – and became an assistant professor for the School of Education in counselor education. He stayed in that role until he retired last June, one month after Leslie.
Leslie will tell you that Marc had a lot of girlfriends, and she knows that because she counseled him through breakup after breakup. Marc just didn’t do well in the dating game, he said; the one constant in each of his bad relationships was him. By age 50, he assumed marriage just wasn’t in the cards for him, that he was a confirmed bachelor. But, in 2009, he got married, and in one fell swoop also became a stepfather – a husband and a father for the first time at age 53. Not only was Leslie at Marc’s wedding, but she threw him an engagement party the night before and made the dress Marc’s stepdaughter wore at the wedding.
Marc and his first wife were married for eight years before choosing to separate in 2016.
“It was really painful,” Marc said. “I felt like an enormous failure. I never thought I’d get married, and I sure never thought I’d get divorced.”
The first call he made after he and his first wife decided to separate was to Leslie. She herself had finalized her divorce two years prior, in 2014, so she knew how painful the process was all too well. She even helped Marc find a therapist because she was worried for his mental health at the time. She helped him find a place to live and helped furnish it. Cooked him food. Brought their group of friends over so he would never be lonely.
“I don’t believe at that point [in 2016] I thought I was capable of being in a successful, intimate relationship with someone else,” Marc said. “I didn’t know how to do it. I thought ‘If I can get through the pain of this and get back to the place where life’s okay, not wonderful, but okay and bearable for me.’ It was so painful that every day I was going in classrooms teaching students who were preparing to be counselors how to communicate, all of those different things to help people be successful, then going home every night where I can’t have a conversation with the person that’s the most intimate relationship of my life. That, to me, added to the sense of failure and of hopelessness – I felt like such a fraud and, I think, a sense of shame and humiliation. I thought ‘I can’t do this, I don’t know how to do this, and this is why I don’t want to do this [be in a relationship] anymore.’”
Marc’s divorce was finalized in 2017. For the first time in their 30-year friendship, they were both single at the same time. – but the last thing either of them thought was, one year later, they’d be a couple.
“What Marc and I have is unlike anything, any relationship I’ve ever had in my life,” Leslie said. “Sometimes in life you don’t know how unhappy you are until you’re out of a situation. That’s true for me. I was quite fearful of getting into any kind of relationship again. It’s not insignificant when your marriage of 40 years dissolves. That’s our lifetime. I thought ‘I’m not doing this. Nothing is worth this kind of personal pain.’ It was absolutely daunting, the thought of dating again at 60. I wasn’t particularly good at dating as a teenager, and it was intimidating to do in my sixties. Men asked me out, and I just froze. I went out on one date and I thought ‘Oh, I can’t do this.’ The other thing was, I had a huge trust issue. I just didn’t trust men, and wasn’t going to date. Me and my dogs – that was absolutely fine for me.”
Both thought their days at love were over, when, in truth, their days at love had never begun. Not until that night – that night they found their way home.
***
If Marc’s being honest, he said, he recognized that, for the first time in his 30 years of knowing Leslie, they were both single. But every time that fleeting thought crept into his mind, sheer terror followed, complete and utter fear, that even the thought of a romantic feeling towards her could ruin their friendship. As friends who were both on the other side of horrifically painful divorces, they talked about, if they ever did date again, what they’d learned was important to them in a romantic partner. But, just as he felt in 1987, Marc thought he didn’t stand one single tiny chance in hell of snagging Leslie Banahan.
“I will tell you this – I didn’t believe there was any chance in the world at all that Leslie would ever think of me in a romantic way or ever possibly have any feelings for me,” he said. “I was so afraid I would lose this person. I told people this for years: ‘Leslie is the best person I know.’ The idea of losing our friendship was so scary to me. When I was with her, I felt like myself. When I’m with her, I feel like I’m at home for the first time in my life. I sound like a bad rom com, but it’s so true.”
But that night on the couch watching baseball, he pushed his fears aside and held her hand for the first time.
“I felt like I was in junior high,” Marc said. “I remember holding hands and thinking ‘Oh my God, this is the greatest thing – oh my God, we’re going to kiss.’ It was unbelievable. I’d never experienced a kiss like that in my entire life. The other thing was – it also felt so normal, it didn’t feel like ‘Oh my God, this is the first kiss with someone.’ It just felt remarkably right, like this is what we’re supposed to be doing. What I knew after that night was I didn’t want to be anywhere else except with her. I couldn’t spend enough time with her. And I knew I didn’t want to be with anyone else the rest of my life. It was never a question.”
Less than 18 months later, on March 2, 2019, Marc, 63, and Leslie, 64, were married.
***
The beginning of their relationship was as natural as breathing, yet uncommon. When you start dating your best friend of 30 years, you don’t have to go through the rigamarole of What do you like to do in your spare time? or Tell me about yourself. Both Marc and Leslie, who knew from their first kiss that this was assuredly a forever thing, were very intentional about not going too fast. There was, after all, a 30-year friendship at stake. And, at a gut level, both truthfully weren’t sure if they were any good at relationships, anyway, and they desperately did not want to screw this up. Cautious was the name of the game. Over the past three decades, Marc and Leslie had become best friends and had amassed a solid group of mutual friends that they hung out with regularly. They very intentionally kept their relationship to themselves for quite some time – they, both introverts, said that moment of privacy was precious to them – and, after telling their children, couldn’t decide which of their friend circle to tell first, so they told all of them at the same time in a group text. Good news – Marc and I are dating! the text said. I knew it! their friends responded. I thought I saw y’all holding hands under the table! Everyone was thrilled. (I will admit, Marc and Leslie were two people I pretty much never saw ending up together, but once I saw on Facebook that they were a couple, after the initial shock factor wore off, I thought Well damn, that makes a whole lotta sense. Of course. Of course!)
Before falling in love with each other, Marc and Leslie had done the work, unpacking their first marriages in therapy and figuring out what happened, what they didn’t do well, and how to be better next time, committed that, if there ever was a next time for them, they’d be better partners. Both agree they are much better partners to each other for having their first marriages, and, in that respect, their first marriages were anything but failures: They were beautiful lessons on what to do and not to do once they finally found one another.
“This is coming to us in the last chapter of our lives, and we want to make the most of this,” Leslie said. “I want to get every day out of it that I can because we’re kidding ourselves if we say we’re middle aged. We’re way beyond that.”
Marc had loved Leslie for 30 years, he said, but now he was in love with her. Through their 30 years of friendship, never once thinking they’d ever be together romantically, Marc let every one of his walls down and let Leslie see him – the good, the bad, the ugly. He was never trying to court her, so he could be his true self.
“I’m incredibly safe saying that I’ve never felt anything so certain in my life,” he said. “I’ve never felt this kind of experience with another woman. It became clear to me in all my other romantic relationships that I was really afraid to be myself. I felt like I needed to perform somehow to make a person like me or care about me. For the first time I knew Leslie loved me, and had loved me all this time. She loved me in spite of myself. I felt safe enough to be myself, and it was the most freeing feeling, one I’d never had before. I wanted more of that.”
Eventually, they asked the question: Do we ever want to get married again? They knew they were going to spend the rest of their lives with one another, but was making it legally binding necessary? They considered just living together as companions, but then thought of Marc’s then 14-year-old daughter (the term stepdaughter is not used to describe their bond) and Leslie’s grandchildren, and how they’d explain that to the young people in their lives. There was something about the time-honored tradition of standing in their church and saying vows that appealed to them.
They decided to marry.
***
Marc completely surprised Leslie with his proposal in October 2018, a year after they began dating. Marc calls this time – as he was preparing to propose – the hardest time of their courtship and the only part of their love story that caused him pain. Leslie had a ring she wore that was very important to her. Early on, Marc asked her, if they ever got married, would she want a ring? She told him she’d like to keep the ring that was significant to her and maybe add a band to it. So great, Marc thought, I don’t have to buy a ring, but when I ask her to marry me, what am I going to do? He agonized over this.
“That moment of actually asking her to marry me is so symbolic to me and so important,” he said. “The idea of not having a symbol we could hold onto just didn’t feel right to me. I spent three to four months thinking about it. I would have probably asked her to marry me several months earlier, but I couldn’t figure it out.”
Then, it came to him. They had both always said that, when they were together, it felt like they were home. After they kissed, Leslie said, they found their way home. So Marc had a jeweler make a necklace pendant, and on one side it had a picture of home, and on the other side it had a picture engraved of them holding hands. Right after the piece was made, Marc proposed.
“She was completely caught off guard and so excited,” he said. “I figured she was expecting it. You could see the look of surprise in her eyes.”
Marc, who will tell you himself he is not a gifted planner and organizer, was so damn excited that the day after he proposed he had booked the date, the church, and the musician for their wedding.
***
Marc and Leslie married on March 2, 2019 at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Oxford.
“One of the wonderful things about getting married in your sixties is you can do it any way you want to,” Leslie said. “We wanted to get married in the morning based on a couple of things – Marc and I both love breakfast, and our favorite hymn is ‘Morning Has Broken.’ And that was the hymn at our wedding.”
They married at 10:30 a.m., Leslie in a blue dress, Marc in blue jeans, a sport coat, and boots. Though Leslie’s son offered to walk her down the aisle, she declined. No, you don’t own me, she said. Nobody owns me. Instead, she chose to walk down the aisle with Marc, symbolically showing that they were walking into this together. The church was packed, standing room only. Guests came from all over – California. New York. Washington. Arizona. Texas. Afterwards, brunch – jazz playing in the background. Bloody Marys. Mimosas. A coffee bar. People stayed and stayed and drank and drank.
When Marc married for the first time, he became a stepfather – or, rather, a father. His daughter, 14 at the time, sang along with her father while he played the guitar. The song they sang, a duet to Leslie? “I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You.” There wasn’t a dry eye there.
“The only thing that could have made our wedding day better is if it had lasted longer,” Marc said. “Our priest didn’t tell us what he was going to do, but his theme was ‘saving the best for last.’ And that’s what we feel like we’ve done.”
***
Marc and Leslie Showalter just celebrated their first anniversary of their marriage last month. Just a couple of months after marrying, both retired from Ole Miss. Now, in retirement, Leslie said, it turns out she and her husband are really good at doing nothing. Both not morning people, they ease slowly into their days. They love being at home. Marc plays the guitar and sings. Leslie works in the yard and reads. Marc reads, too. Leslie loves to cook, and Marc loves to eat, so it works out great. They travel, they visit friends, they enjoy the theatre, and music, and shopping, and baseball, and conversation. They share similar interests and senses of humor, and it’s easy. They can talk nonstop for an hour or be silent sitting next to one another for an hour and it’s equally as comfortable. They watch basketball games and British baking shows and enjoy both just the same.
“We say almost every day that we are so grateful for our quiet little life,” Leslie said. “Sometimes I do lament that Marc and I aren’t going to have a 40-year marriage because of where we are in life, but God’s timing is always perfect. I don’t believe Marc and I would have been good partners for each other earlier. I think the timing was perfect.”
Marc agreed.
“I feel the same way,” he said. “There are days I think it would have been wonderful to be married to Leslie when I was 40, but I don’t think I could have been as good a husband to her as a 40- or 50-year-old guy. I learned so much in my first marriage that I needed to know. I want to be the very best partner I can be for Leslie, and I wasn’t that guy even five years ago. If you had told me ‘Hey, you’re going to have the happiest part of your life in your sixties’ – I don’t think it’s an accident that these things happen. Neither one of us was looking for this. I find myself telling people that when you’re trying to find someone to be with, find the person you can be yourself with, the person that when you’re with them your true self comes out. I tried so hard to hide my true self from people in love, and it left me disconnected from myself. Leslie allowed me to not only connect to her, but to connect to me. That’s what has brought a level of contentment that I didn’t think was possible and that I’d never experienced before. I tell her all the time, I feel like I am at home for the first time in my life. I wouldn’t trade that for anything. I had to wait 62 years to have that. But it was worth it.”
***
As happy as they are today, I asked Marc and Leslie to return to the darkest moment in their lives – the raw, often excruciating pain immediately post-divorce. Leslie came out of her 40-year first marriage with abundant trust issues. With Marc, there are none of those. In their entire 30-year friendship, even wading through incredibly difficult and stressful situations, they’ve never had a single disagreement. He has never disappointed her. Even before they began dating, they knew one another, deeply.
“Oh, absolutely, I would go through all of the pain again for this,” she said. “If ending a 40-year marriage got me this, there’s no question I’d do it again.”
It worked out just how it was supposed to, Marc said.
“I didn’t think it was possible to be as happy and content as I am every day with Leslie,” he said. “I agree with her – had I known that I had to go through that, I would have gladly done it when in the midst of it. [After my divorce] I was not willing to try to invest in other relationships. I didn’t know that I’d taken the risk over 30 years to let Leslie know me. It happened without me realizing it – I let her know me. The thing that surprised us both was the more Leslie knew me, the more she seemed to like me. It didn’t surprise me that the more I knew her, the more I liked about her. I think having the courage to let someone really know all of you, letting someone embrace all of you and not push them away – I think about my dearest friends in life, and the more I know them, the more I want to know. I am the luckiest man you’re ever going to meet. I feel that way every day.”
Society teaches us that we have an expiration date after a certain age, that happiness and love and fairytales and butterflies and coming home end at a certain point. Most people – Marc and Leslie included – never would have envisioned themselves at their happiest in their mid-sixties. But here they are. The Showalters. Happier than almost any couple I’ve ever met, in love, retired, and full of lessons learned along the way, lessons that got them to here – to bliss. They’ve come a long way in 33 years, a long way from Leslie mistaking Marc for “Walter,” a long way from the rock bottom of their divorces, a long way from the pain and shame and hurt of yesterday. Who would have ever thought? Yes, they might have taken the long route, but they have, blissfully, arrived home, hand in hand with their best friend, ready to sway gracefully into the twilight of their lives together. Finally, together. Merging deep into their sixties, what society calls the end of life is, for the Showalters, a blessed beginning.
“A really great lesson I learned late in life is friends are everything, and those relationships with the people who love you make you,” Leslie said. “And who knows? You might just fall in love and marry your best friend.”