Dad's Sweet Texts About His 27-Year Marriage Go Viral
Lance Willoughby had no idea his daughter Sydney shared his messages.
— -- After one high school senior was tasked with writing an essay about her parents, her father gave the internet a lesson on the sustaining power of love.
Sydney Willoughby tweeted screenshots of the text messages her father, Lance, wrote to help her with the assignment.
She then captioned the screenshots with: "I'm writing an essay about my parents and hearing this from my dad about my mom made me cry. 27 years of marriage."
Those messages quickly went viral with nearly 10,000 people retweeting them and over 19,000 liking them.
The San Antonio, Texas father of three, wrote, "Your mom basically asks me to marry her...two weeks later I was absolutely madly in love with your mom. She was more than a dream come true for me."
Then the 47-year-old member of the military admitted that his 27-year marriage hit a rough patch after "not seeing enough of each other."
But after having their third child, Sydney, Lance's wife Kimberly stayed home to take care of the kids.
"So you were the way to bring us back together," he wrote in the now viral messages. "Didn't know it at the time but you changed our lives."
It also helped, Lance told ABC News, that he came home from a three-month stint away "and when I got back we just had so much time together that it was like falling in love all over again."
"I've learned that it's easy to fall in love with the same person multiple times," he said.
Lance said that he wasn't even on Twitter when his sentimental text messages went viral. He has since joined the social media network.
"When [Sydney] first told me, I was like, 'You posted what? My personal text messages?'" Lance recalled. "But she did it with good intentions and it was sweet how she did it."
Lance said he hopes that others will be inspired by his family.