Mario Tims and Neitasha Buchanan found each other in the halls of J.A. Fair High School in Little Rock, and it was there that he asked her to be his girlfriend.
During second period on May 7, 1996 -- his senior year -- he asked for a bathroom pass but headed for Neitasha's social studies class instead of the men's room.
The first time I saw my future spouse:
She says: “I saw him in the hallway and someone said, ‘That’s that cute new boy from California,’ and I said, ‘Oh, yeah, he is cute.’”
He says: “I’m pretty sure it was randomly in the hallway the first time I saw her, and I remember thinking she was very beautiful.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “I was ready. I was so excited.”
He says: “Other than it being hot because the air conditioning was out, I would say it was perfect.”
My advice for a lasting marriage is:
She says: “My mom told me — she told everybody — to continue to date. She said don’t stop dating after you get married. We try to do that every now and then, get out and do things together. He’s still my boyfriend.”
He says: “Communicate. I think in some of the best times of our marriage we have been really communicating well. And put God first. I’ve always said, from the beginning, that we can love each other better if we try to put each other in second place than if we try to put each other in first place.”
"I knocked on the door and I said, 'Can I talk to Neitasha for a second? It's important,'" he says. "She came out there, and I told her I wanted to be her boyfriend. I wanted her to be my girlfriend, and she said, 'No.'"
"And then I said, 'I'm just kidding. OK,'" Neitasha says.
His request was a long time coming.
He arrived at J.A. Fair in 1995 as an 11th-grader when his family moved from California to Arkansas. Neitasha was a sophomore then.
"He was the cute new boy from California," she says.
They had mutual friends, and someone casually introduced them in the cafeteria. "It wasn't like we were liking each other at that time, but we all just hung around and we had the same core friends," Mario says.
Over the next year things "took a turn."
"There was a teenage dance club called the Wrangler and teenagers would go there on, I think, Sunday nights," he says. "I saw her on the dance floor, and I asked her to dance."
"I wasn't supposed to be there," Neitasha says. "But we danced a couple of times."
Mario even remembers exactly what Neitasha was wearing on that particular night -- an amber button-up shirt with white stars and blue jean shorts.
"It was cute, too," he says. "That's when I knew I had to have her as my girlfriend." This was still in high school, though, so the indirect route seemed most reasonable. He talked to her friends. "I started trying to extend some hints, hoping they would make it back to her."
They did.
"He was kind of flirting a little bit," Neitasha says. "Once people started coming and talking to me -- and I could tell they were serious -- I guess then things started taking a turn. He always kept me laughing. He still does. That kind of got me."
They hung out with friends and talked on the phone for the remainder of school, and after graduation, Mario asked Neitasha to go on a date. She said he had to meet her parents first.
"That was really cool," he says. "I had had girlfriends in high school, but that was the first time any girl had told me that I had to meet her parents. I think that was one of the more attractive things about her. She was always really down to earth."
Mario called Neitasha during lunch breaks at his summer job at Mr. Tidy Car Wash, sometimes while she was working at Cato's. She spent most evenings and weekends playing softball. But Mario finally did meet her parents, and they went on their first date in August, on Neitasha's 17th birthday. They went to dinner and a movie chaperoned by her older sister and her boyfriend.
When school started back up, Mario spent his days at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock but found time to visit Neitasha and some of his old teachers and classmates at J.A. Fair. She graduated and left for college at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff -- playing softball plus two other sports -- and he got her a cellphone to help them to stay in touch.
In August 2001, Mario rented the party room at Steak and Ale in Little Rock. He had invited their friends and families for a birthday celebration of sorts for Neitasha. When she opened his gift she was flummoxed.
"He gave me a bridal magazine," she says. "Then I looked down and he was on his knee, and I was like, oh my gosh, a bridal magazine!" They were married on Sept. 14, 2002, in Bethel AME Church in North Little Rock.
Mario is an English teacher at Forest Heights STEM Academy, and Neitasha is the library media specialist at Rockefeller Elementary, both in the Little Rock School District.
He doesn't know why her social studies teacher let him interrupt class to talk to Neitasha that day. He considers what he would do if a boy knocked on his classroom door and asked to talk to a girl.
"I would say, 'Where is your pass? Get out of here,'" he says, maybe thinking of his own daughters: Kennedi, 12, and Kassadi, 7, who are students at his school.
"But seriously, we were just telling Kennedi this week that everything we asked God for really panned out," Mario says. "We said we wanted to be together, and we wanted to get through college. As soon as we got through college, we wanted to get engaged and get married, and then we said we wanted to wait like three years and have children. That's what happened."
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High Profile on 05/14/2017