Amy McDonnell didn't want to go to the fraternity party in 1993 where she met Pat Wike, and she didn't want to dance with him when he asked. She didn't even want to be in Fayetteville at the University of Arkansas, truth be told.
She said yes to all those things, though, and 27 years later she's still glad she did.
Amy's family was living in Florida as she prepared to start her sophomore year at UA and she wanted to stay in Florida and go to a community college. She reluctantly moved back to Fayetteville.
The relays, an annual competition among the Greek organizations on campus, held no interest that day for Amy, a Kappa Kappa Gamma.
"I thought, 'Oh gosh, I am not going to that party,'" Amy says. When a friend asked her to, though, she went.
Pat, the Sigma Nu social chairman, spotted Amy as soon as she arrived.
"It's not my style at all, but I just walked over to her and said, 'Hey, I want you to come dance with me,'" he says. "She turned me down."
Pat persevered.
"The smooth, smooth line that won the day ... I said, 'Come on, you're short like me. Let's go dance,'" he says. "I guess I surprised her with how bad it was or whatever."
Amy conceded.
"I thought he was really cute," she says. "I was like, 'OK, I'll go dance.'"
Amy got thumbs ups and winks from her sorority sisters as she and Pat spent an hour on the dance floor, but when Pat was summoned to take a call on the Sigma Nu house phone and didn't come back right away, she left.
"All I knew was his name," she says. "All my pledge sisters were like, 'He's so cute. He's so fun. Y'all should totally date, you're the perfect couple.'"
Pat had gotten stuck in a long phone conversation with a band about arrangements for another event, but Amy wondered if he had just gotten tired of dancing with her and found an escape route. That night, Pat says, "went down the drain."
"I finally worked up the nerve to call her and ask her out," he says.
Again, Amy's initial answer was no. Her sorority had another function the night he wanted to go out and she had asked another guy to be her date. She asked Pat to call her again sometime, though, and he did. That time, they scheduled a Coke date.
On Nov. 3, 1993, Pat borrowed a friend's Bronco so he could avoid pulling up in front of the Kappa house to pick up Amy in his "super sweet pink Ford Escort," which he explains was really a vintage, faded red.
They went to Mr. Burger, and as they ordered Pat realized he had forgotten his wallet. Amy picked up the tab.
"We had a great night," Amy says. "We visited for the longest time, just talked and talked and talked."
Before Christmas break that year, Amy wrote the phone number of her grandparents, with whom she would be spending the holidays, on a little slip of paper and gave it to Pat.
"I still have that slip of paper to this day," Pat says.
They were inseparable throughout college, and after graduation in 1996, Amy took a job in Tulsa. She was packed and ready to go, and Pat surmises that if she had gone that would have been the end for them.
"We thought we could [stay together] long-distance but I don't think we would have," he says.
Instead, Amy got a last-minute offer to stay in Fayetteville.
They had dated for seven years when she announced to Pat during happy hour at Hog City Diner in the Old Post Office building that she thought it was time for them to get married.
"She kept thinking I was going to ask her to marry me," says Pat, who isn't quite sure why he hadn't.
Pat said, simply, OK.
"I was like, 'If I had known it was going to be that easy, I would have done this three years ago,'" Amy quips.
She had been planning her wedding since she was a little girl, she says. She had a stack of bridal magazines and a bunch of ideas. They made their wedding invitation list on napkins right there at the dinner table.
"I had it all planned out," she says. "I was just waiting for him to ask."
Five months later, on May 6, 2000, they exchanged their vows at First Baptist Church in Benton.
"It was the most perfect, wonderful day," she says. "It was the best day ever."
They moved to Little Rock as newlyweds, but returned to Northwest Arkansas 10 years later. They live in Springdale with their sons Sam, 18, and Max, 13. Amy is a distributor for Amare Global and Pat runs three separate businesses in the freight and commodities brokering industry.
"We still, to this day, would rather hang out with each other than any of our friends," Pat says. "We've traveled extensively with our kids. We just all go everywhere together, and we just like each other."
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The first time I saw my future spouse:
She says: “I knew he was the one. I had never felt like that before and I just knew it.”
He says: “She was really cute and I wanted to go ask her to dance with me. Then she turned me down.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “I can remember just thinking, ‘This is the most perfect day. Everything is perfect. My dress is fabulous. Everybody I love is here.’ I didn’t think that life could get any better than that.”
He says: “After the reception at the church, all of our closest friends went with us to the Embassy Suites in Little Rock and they all told their favorite stories about us.”
My advice for a long happy marriage:
She says: “Patience. Lots and lots of patience.”
He says: “That and marry your best friend. We don’t take each other too seriously.”
