“A lifetime home run”

Juli and Dale have a set routine that Juli says she “drags him through” every morning, starting with making the bed and working out in their basement, and ending with making dinner together — she cooks, he cleans.

“We always make the bed,” Juli said, holding the family dog, Trixie, in her lap.

Dale said Juli was able to make instant judgments on things, and “99 percent of the time, she is dead on, and is to this day.”

“I could tell early on she knew what she wanted, was decisive, and I found that really attractive,” Dale said, recollecting his early memories of Juli. “Because, frankly, I was more the indecisive one. It was kinda an opposites attract kind of thing.”

Juli said she is very much the optimistic type, and that has not changed as she has gotten older.

“With everything I do, I jump in with both feet,” Juli said. “I’m excited. I say, ‘Let’s go for it,’ and I’m ready.”

That mentality helped Dale realize the moment that Juli was the one he was going to marry, when she told him she loved him during a weekend visiting his parents in Buffalo Center, Iowa.

Her decisiveness and his ability to mull things over allowed them to balance each other well, he said.

When it neared time for Dale to start looking for post-graduation jobs, Juli said she asked him what was going to happen with them if he decided to move.

“I think my threat, at one point, I said, ‘If you go somewhere else, and there’s no commitment here, then there is no commitment here. I’m going to go do my thing,’” Juli said. “I don’t wait around.”

Juli had been in some previous relationships with ups and downs, and knew that she never wanted to go back to that again.

“I became very independent after that, and, I mean, I had no problem going and doing my thing, but I’m not playing the game,” she said. “We’re together, or we’re not, and that’s what it’s gonna be.”

Dale said after that, he saw the writing on the wall, and it was “thick and black.”

After missing Valentine’s Day the year before, Dale made sure to make up for it the next year. On Feb. 14, 1983, he presented her with roses and breakfast in bed, and proposed with a heart-shaped ring. Juli sadly doesn’t have that ring anymore, as it used to catch on everything and scratch their kids.

The wedding was planned for April 1984, but the couple eventually moved it up to Sept. 17, 1983.

“The vision was so clear, yet I was in denial. It was the difference between someone who had previous relationships, and I had not really had any,” Dale said, grabbing Juli’s hand at the table next to an empty martini glass. “So, what turned out to be my first serious relationship is a lifetime home run.”