Being married to your best friend is a sacred opportunity. Gale Buchanan shares an evocative, heartfelt, and heart-wrenching memoir of his beautiful, once-in-a-lifetime love with his wife and best friend, Carol.

After 7 ½ years of marriage while completing requirements for the PhD and then working tirelessly towards earning promotion and tenure, Gale Buchanan was unexpectedly, newly divorced. Viewing divorce as the first real major failure in his life, Gale had work to worry about—not finding a new mate. Fate, it seems, had other plans.

A chance meeting with a colleague revealed a potential mate that set in motion a life more beautiful than either could have imagined. In Carol, Gale chronicles his and his wife’s life together, from first meeting and courtship to some hard years, to the moment she breathed her last.

It’s a love story—as all marriages are—about how two divorced people fell for each other, married, and raised a family. It’s a real-life fairytale about the good as well as not so good times and life’s struggles; how Gale and Carol grew in their relationship with each other, their children, and God.

Carol spans 52 years of love between Carol and Gale, encapsulating in words a rare love that many people search for and fail to find.

Dive into a memoir about life, love, and the beauty of sharing both with your best friend. It’s a great story for young men and women contemplating marriage, couples preparing to enter a new marriage (whether their first or not), and couples searching for answers as they experience trials and navigate obstacles in their marriage.

There are many challenges and unforeseen problems in marriage, but the phenomenal joy of sharing life with someone you love is the greatest of human experiences.