Do you remember your first boyfriend or girlfriend? That person can be extremely hard to forget. Your feelings at that age are so new, exciting, and confusing all at the same time. I'm not talking about your middle school or high school significant other. I'm talking about your real first love.
Young children are always trying to mirror what the adults are doing, so it's very common to see two preschoolers proclaim each other boyfriend and girlfriend, or say they are in love with each other. It's all very cute and innocent. These relationships quickly fade and become distant memories.
It's very easy to take those young relationships and let the memories fade as if they weren't that important. What is important when you're in preschool? Coloring and cartoons, not relationships. That's why this story is so inspiring. This is about two 5-year old best friends who later fell in love.
This story begins when a teenager with nothing better to do decided to go through her mom's old address book. It was the Summer of 2012 when Natalie Crow was going through an old storage bin and found her mom's old address book. It sparked the idea to look for an old name from her past. The person she decided to look up was Austin Tatman. Austin and Natalie were best friends back in the day when they were just five-years-old. When Natalie moved from Florida to Connecticut, the two of them had lost touch.
Natalie Crowe isn't even sure what sparked her desire to search for Austin. As she told TODAY, "For whatever reason, the first person to come to my mind was Austin. Still to this day, I have no idea why I went to it."
It had been a whole 12 years since Austin and Natalie had seen each other or spoken, but with the advent of social media, it was easy for Natalie to look him up on Facebook. She sent him a message, and sure enough, he remembered her. Austin told TODAY, "It was just like being back with your best friend that you haven't seen, which was the craziest experience for me. You can never replicate that ... being away from someone and reconnecting."
The two of them ended up sparking a new romance together, but it became more than a fun little fling. The two of them got married on April 13th. Natalie told TODAY, "From the second that we met in pre-K we were best friends. Our parents pretty much told us that it was a very, very special bond that we shared."
Both Natalie Crow and Austin Tatman are 24 now, but they met all the way back in 1999. Even though it was so long ago, they still have memories of holding hands, going on boat trips, and trick or treating. Tatman and Crow's parents never forgot each other. They'd often ask if their children remembered each other. It turns out they were even more excited about the two of them connecting than Crow and Tatman themselves. "Both sets of our parents were so supportive when we first reconnected. They were just as excited, if not more excited, than we were,"Tatman told TODAY.
What's even more amazing about this couple is that after they reconnected, they stayed together throughout a long-distance relationship in highschool and college. In 2017, Austin proposed. It's been happily ever after ever since.
