Walmart Employee Gets Surprised With Proposal From Ex-Husband on Valentine's Day
The two, who are both 75 now, have been divorced for over 43 years.
— -- Perhaps it is true your first love never really dies. A 75-year-old woman's ex-husband surprised her when he proposed to her again after being divorced for 43 years.
The Valentine's Day proposal happened at the Fort Smith, Arkansas, Walmart, where the woman works.
Walmart employee Renate Stumpf can be seen on video being surprised from behind by her ex-husband-now-fiance Louis Demetriades.
"Hey, good-looking," Demetriades greeted her while carrying a sign that read, "Happy Valentine's Day! Will you marry me?"
Stumpf declined the offer at first to tease him, she told ABC News today .
"Forty-three years is a long time, so I wasn't sure at first," she said, "but I will marry him though because he's changed for the better, I've come to realize."
She added that this was the best Valentine's Day she has ever had and that the proposal "knocked her socks off."
Demetriades did not immediately respond to ABC News' calls for comment.
The two first met at an army base in Germany when they were both 18.
"I was working in the kitchen at the army base, and he was a soldier," Stumpf said. "The first time I ever saw him, he asked me if I could fix him a hamburger. He liked who he saw, so he asked to go help me out in the kitchen."
She told him to get out because she didn't need help, but he kept on coming back and a romantic relationship ensued, Stumpf added.
The two of them had three children together and had a difficult life when they moved to the United States, Stumpf said.
"We had little financial support, I didn't know anything and I could barely speak English," she said. "We started arguing about every little thing."
After about 13 years of marriage, they divorced, Stumpf said. They eventually remarried, but both their second spouses have recently died.
The two reconnected in December, Stumpf said, after her "stubborn husband" tried to get a hold of their daughter through Facebook and called the Walmart to rekindle a friendship.
"When we saw each other again last December, we knew right then we still loved each other for sure," Stumpf said. "That love has never passed."
The two were thinking about doing the civil wedding today, and a church wedding later, Stumpf told ABC News, but they decided to wait a little and just enjoy each other's company for a bit.
"There's no rush at my age," Stumpf said. "God put us together again, and it couldn't be any other way after all these years."
