Not everyone who graduated from high school around the same time “The Breakfast Club” was in theaters took the lyrics to that movie’s theme song, “Don’t You Forget About Me,” to heart. But a few did. Joe Pantaleo, for one.
In 1982, when he was a sophomore at Roseville High School in Roseville, Mich., everybody knew Mr. Pantaleo had a crush on Diana Ellis Jewell, a senior (known back then as Diana Ellis). The crush developed in the school hallway: Mr. Pantaleo was on crutches after breaking his leg playing running back during a varsity football game. He was struggling on the crutches and dropped a textbook. She saw him, scooped the book up and offered to carry the rest. He accepted.
“We became the best of friends,” said Ms. Jewell of the encounter that started their relationship. For Mr. Pantaleo, though, the dropped book became something more. “Diana was like an angel ascending that day,” he said. “I was so unsteady. When she said, ‘Do you need some help?,’ her voice did something to me.” His determination to win her heart started right then. It wouldn’t let up for 36 years.
Mr. Pantaleo, 50, had never been married. Ms. Jewell, 52, was a divorced mother of a 15-year-old daughter, Lacy Mae Jewell. Their post-Roseville High lives barely intersected until 2011, when a get-together with high school classmates reunited them. Mr. Pantaleo was never quite able to shake the idea that they were meant to be.
Hopeless romantics would call Mr. Pantaleo’s pursuit of Ms. Jewell a long-shot. Back in high school, the helpful instinct that led her to offer an injured jock a hand did not extend to making underclassmen’s romantic dreams come true. At Roseville in the 1980s, said Ms. Jewell of Charlotte, Mich., senior girls did not go out with younger boys. So even though she liked Mr. Pantaleo, she wasn’t prepared to break any teen social codes to date him. “He would leave a lot of notes on my locker, and I liked him very much. But my ego at that time, my maturity level, just didn’t allow me,” she said.
Continue reading the main storyShe was friendly with Mr. Pantaleo, and many Sunday nights after his leg healed they danced together at the local teen club to the Jackson Five’s “I’ll Be There,” a song they both loved. But when she graduated and enrolled in a local community college, she didn’t stay in touch.
Mr. Pantaleo, with two more years of high school ahead of him, was heartsick but not the moping type. Instead of pining for Ms. Jewell or settling into a relationship with another girl, he immersed himself in sports. In 1985, the year he graduated, he won a wrestling scholarship to the University of Michigan. By 1987, he had won titles including a world freestyle championship. In 1992, two years after he graduated college and the same year he was ranked No. 1 in the world in his weight class, he earned a spot as an alternate on the United States Olympic wrestling team. And so his love life was stalled.
Ms. Jewell’s love life, on the other hand, was taking flight. After plunging into a career in the health industry in the mid-1980s and landing a job as a regional supervisor for Jenny Craig in Michigan in the ’90s, she was ready to settle down. In 1998, she got engaged to the man she would marry the next year.
Mr. Pantaleo, by then a Grosse Pointe, Mich., high school teacher with a stint as a Michigan State University wrestling coach behind him, was not spared Ms. Jewell’s happy news.
“This is the funny part,” Mr. Pantaleo said. “I left East Lansing, where I was a coach, and moved back to the Detroit area where Diana was in 1997 to teach. In the spring of 1998, I finally reconnected with her.” By chance, the gym he joined, in Clinton Township, Mich., was in the same strip mall as Ms. Jewell’s Jenny Craig office. Mr. Pantaleo was working out when he bumped into Ms. Jewell, also a gym member.
“Her personality, her smile, the twinkle in her eye, the way she says my name — all of that God-given stuff was still there, she hadn’t changed a bit,” he said. “I was still captivated. I had butterflies when I saw her. I was thinking, maybe I finally have a shot with Diana.” The next day, he sent her flowers.
Ms. Jewell, still as friendly as in high school, agreed to go rollerblading with Mr. Pantaleo a few weeks after the chance gym meeting. In her helmet and kneepads, she told him about her new boyfriend, who would become her fiancé later that year.
“I was shattered,” Mr. Pantaleo said. “But at the same time I knew I had to continue on with my life. You just kind of go, Oh, I guess I missed my shot, and try to regroup.”
Ms. Jewell moved to Charlotte, near Mr. Pantaleo’s former job in East Lansing, with her husband the next year. Mr. Pantaleo continued teaching until 2009, when an assistant wrestling coaching job at Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Va., opened. His nephew was on the team.
Liberty, founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, is a Christian university. Mr. Pantaleo was not the religious type when he started out there. “I had a friend who was always trying to get me to go to church. I would say, I’m not going into any church. My feet will burn up!” he said. But the job at Liberty, he said, connected him with his spiritual side. In 2011, when the college dropped its N.C.A.A. Division I wrestling program, he returned to Michigan a devout Christian.
Ms. Jewell, struggling in her marriage by then, was also finding comfort in her faith. At the 2011 get-together with high school friends that reunited them for the second time since high school, they bonded over talk about God. Still, Mr. Pantaleo’s romantic timing was off. Ms. Jewell’s divorce was not final until 2016. Both were morally opposed to dating until she was legally single.
“I think the divorce had already happened psychologically when Joe came back into her life,” said Robin Crouch, Ms. Jewell’s pastor at First Baptist Church in Charlotte. “But she knew she had to set boundaries if she wanted to look back and say, ‘What I did was right for Lacy and for my faith.’”
Mr. Pantaleo wouldn’t have his first kiss with Ms. Jewell until Jan. 27, 2017. When it finally came, during a dance around the living room he now shares with Ms. Jewell in Charlotte, he had a song cued: the Jackson Five’s “I’ll Be There.”
Mr. Crouch, who had encouraged that first kiss, anticipated Mr. Pantaleo’s herculean patience. “He’s the type of person who sets goals and goes after them,” Mr. Crouch said. “He brought the same intensity he showed in his athletic career, when he was a champion, to his relationship with Diana. He knew he couldn’t get there overnight.”
A little less than a year after that long-awaited kiss, on Jan. 5, 2018, Mr. Pantaleo, now the director of marketing at the human resources firm America’s Back Office in Sterling Heights, Mich., asked Ms. Jewell and Lacy to take a day trip with him to Roseville.
“I said, ‘We should take Lacy by the school and show her where we met,’” he said. Ms. Jewell needed convincing; she wasn’t sure her daughter would be interested. Lacy, though, was on board.
Mr. Pantaleo planned to propose and had armed himself with a 1.8 carat diamond solitaire bought at a Lansing jewelry shop. He enlisted Lacy to keep his secret days earlier.
In Roseville, Mr. Pantaleo arranged for a friend who works for the school district to let them in since school was closed for holiday break. Ms. Jewell and Lacy followed Mr. Pantaleo to the spot where he dropped his books all those years ago.
“He got down on one knee and said, Will you be my wife?” Ms. Jewell said. “I said yes, forever.”
On March 31, on Vedado Way Beach in Naples, Fla., Mr. Pantaleo, wearing a white button-down shirt and khakis, finally married Ms. Jewell, barefoot and in an ivory French lace dress by Grace Loves Lace, before a circle of only six guests. Lacy was maid of honor; Mr. Pantaleo’s brother Dan Pantaleo was best man. Mr. Crouch, now retired and living in West Virginia, officiated.
As Mr. Pantaleo watched Ms. Jewell walk toward him over a path in the sand laid with rose petals, he was in tears. “My heart is so happy today,” he said.
During a short ceremony, Mr. Crouch reflected on the 36-year odyssey that delivered Ms. Jewell to Mr. Pantaleo. “They just wanted to do it right. And they have,” he said.
Post-wedding, Lacy expressed her happiness. “I couldn’t ask for a better person in my life,” she said.
Months earlier, she had summed up the couple’s long but triumphant journey in a picture posted on Instagram: “Thirty-six years later, it IS possible to get out of the friend zone, y’all,” she wrote.
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