Michele Newman and Dave Lindgren dated as teenagers in the small farming town of Loyal, Wis., but they had broken up by the time Michele found out she was pregnant. She gave birth as a junior in high school and the ex-couple gave the baby up for adoption. Thirty-five years later, that baby—Martin Schmidt—initiated a reunion with his biological family that went way beyond what he expected. Schmidt got in touch with Newman first, and it made her think about Lindgren, whom she hadn't spoken to since she was pregnant with their child. "There was never any real bitterness between us," she tells the New York Times. "Dave was a good man with a good heart." She tracked him down and sent him a text message, and the rest is history.
They began spending hours on the phone. Lindgren visited her in Hawaii, where she lived at the time, and there was an "instant connection," Lindgren says. Both Newman and Lindgren also talked a lot with Schmidt, as did his newfound biological grandparents. Eventually, Newman moved back to Wisconsin, stopping in Colorado along the way to see Schmidt. And in 2015, exactly a year after she sent Lindgren that first fateful text message, he proposed. Last month, they wed—with Schmidt, who had gotten ordained on a lark, officiating the ceremony. "I wouldn’t change any of this at all," Newman told their guests. "The day that I got the call that Martin wanted to reach out to us was the best day of my life. And it’s just gotten better every day after that." Click to read the full story. (More uplifting news stories.)