When they first met on a beach in Fort Lauderdale, former Senator Harris Wofford was 75 and his soon-to-be husband, interior designer Matthew Charlton, was just 25.
Now, 15 years later, the Washington couple plan to tie the knot on April 30, exactly three weeks after Wofford's 90th birthday and 68 years after his first wedding, to Clare Wofford, to whom the former politician was happily married for 48 years before her death.
If all that maths is more than confusing, Harris Wofford recently provided a simple common denominator: "It is based on love," he wrote in the New York Times on Sunday.
In a moving (and surprising) personal essay that spanned his meeting Clare when the two were student activists during World War II and then Charlton as the former senator from Pennsylvania was settling into life as a widower five decades later, Wofford directly challenged the need for labels.
"To some, our bond is entirely natural, to others it comes as a strange surprise, but most soon see the strength of our feelings and our devotion to each other. We have now been together for 15 years.