Melissa Englade's mother advised her not to talk to Ron Ziegenhorn. So talk to him is exactly what she did.
"I considered it a challenge," Melissa says.
The first time I saw my future spouse:
She says: “I turned to my mom and said, ‘Is that him?’ It was actually curiosity.”
He says: “I thought she was in her 20s.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “It was one of the happiest days of my life.”
He says: “It went better than I ever thought it would.”
My advice for a long happy marriage:
She says: “Don’t hold back hurt feelings. You’ve got to work it through. You have to communicate. And be aware of your spouse’s needs.”
He says: “Be friends first.”
Melissa had just moved from New Orleans to Little Rock to be near her family in July 2005. Her parents knew Ron through an after-school program they volunteered with, and her mom had told her stories about him for a year or so. He took care of his brothers, who had myotonic dystrophy, as well as his mother, she had heard. And he wore eccentric costumes to the annual Halloween party the program's director hosted.
Melissa didn't meet Ron until September, after school started and the program was underway.
"We would feed the kids before they went off with their tutors at this program. I was helping my mom serve and she goes, 'There's Ron. Don't talk to him. He's cranky,'" she says. "Well, that was like waving a red flag in front of a bull to me. I decided I was going to talk to him."
Ron wasn't all that surprised that she was talking to him -- and he wasn't surly.
"It's just that my resting face looks like I'm mad at the world," he quips.
They exchanged small talk each week as they volunteered, and then when Halloween rolled around, they chatted at the director's party.
In response to conversation about their mutual lack of success in meeting people through eHarmony, Melissa said, "We need to get you a girlfriend."
"But I didn't mean me," she insists.
She complained about him to her mother on the way home from the party -- he refused to take off the goggles that went with his mad scientist costume while they talked and he even had the gall to say something unflattering about Brad Pitt, she railed.
But Melissa and Ron became friends, anyway, and in February they went to dinner and a movie -- just, Melissa clarified beforehand, as friends.
"It was Mardi Gras season and during dinner I started crying because I was just so homesick," she says.
"She told me she wanted to go home," Ron remembers, "and I said, 'You mean right now?'"
"I said, 'No, I mean to New Orleans,'" she says.
They continued seeing each other, baring their souls to each other as good friends do.
"We kept going on dates and we kept saying we were just friends and we told each other everything about each other that was bad," he says.
They don't know exactly when they went from friends to more than friends.
"It just morphed," Melissa says.
In April, Melissa told him she thought she was falling in love with him, but that it scared her.
And by fall, they were discussing marriage.
They went ring shopping in November, and Melissa thought he might give her a ring for Christmas that year. He didn't. He waited until Valentine's Day 2007.
"I got down on one knee and did the whole thing," he says.
They exchanged their vows on July 5, 2008, at Christ the King Catholic Church and then honeymooned at Walt Disney World.
"I had planned the whole thing," Melissa says. "There was one song, 'Angel Eyes,' that he wanted played so we could dance to it. I was in the bathroom changing out of my dress when it came on and Ron was outside. We missed the whole thing. Ron was really upset about it."
For their 10th anniversary, they had a party at Melissa's parents' home in Little Rock. After their guests had finished the catered barbecue dinner, they gathered everyone at the party and she teared up as she explained the meaning of the song they were about to play.
"We danced to the song and that was his present that I had wanted to give him for 10 years," she says. "I gave the party to disguise the present."
Ron supports Melissa as she performs in theater at Pulaski Technical College and does what he can to help so she can focus on studying art at that institution.
"Ron does the dishes and he does laundry and he does cooking and he lets me do my homework," Melissa says. "He is most awesome. My mom says he spoils me too much."
Ron is an introvert and Melissa is an extrovert -- but they find balance in being together.
"I get him to go out and do things," she says.
Not long before they married, she handed him a pair of shoes and said, "Come on, we're going to dance."
Ron and Melissa took tap and ballet lessons and did ballroom dancing together for years.
They aren't sure why it took so long for them to realize they should be together.
"I think our souls knew we were meant to be together but our brains didn't know yet," Melissa says. "We kept trying to deny it, until we couldn't."
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High Profile on 07/22/2018