When best friends Abby Vander Wiele and Rachel Cooper welcomed babies just 14 days apart in 2005, they joked that one day the children might grow up and get married.
“We’re like sisters,” Vander Wiele, 48, tells TODAY.com. “So, of course that was the dream.”
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WATCH HEREHer daughter, Maggie, and Cooper’s son, Malachi, formed an effortless bond growing up side by side in Indiana — much like their mothers had when they first met as college students.
Vander Wiele, a photographer, recalls how, as toddlers, Maggie and Malachi, both blonde and blue eyed, would instantly reach for each other’s hands whenever she took their picture.
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SIGN UP “Our families were always together,” Vander Wiele says, reflecting on how their shared faith brought them closer. Both were active members of their local church, participating in youth programs. There was never a shortage of things to talk about.
One of Maggie’s earliest memories of Malachi was from the playground at their church.
“We were maybe 5 or 6 and he proposed to me,” Maggie tells TODAY.com.
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Many years later, he would do it all over again — but this time with a ring and an original song about how much he loved her.
Maggie and Malachi, both 20, will celebrate their one-year wedding anniversary this August.
“What are the odds?” Vander Wiele says.
Especially considering the Coopers moved more than 900 miles away from Indiana when Malachi was 8.
Long distance communication is never easy — but the Vander Wieles and the Coopers made sure to visit each other often.
On one trip to Florida to see the Coopers, Vander Wiele remembers how Maggie and Malachi, then teenagers, stayed in the pool, playing games long after everyone else had toweled off.
“They’d be out there for hours, just making each other laugh," she says. "That’s when we started to realize, ‘OK… they’ve got a crush.’”
During the school year, they stayed connected through handwritten letters — which they started writing at age 8 — and Maggie has saved every one of them. They officially became a couple at 16, and it was the first relationship for both of them.
“We never dated other people,” Maggie says. “Every time a guy would pursue me, in the back of my mind I think I was like, ‘He doesn’t live up to Malachi.’”
Around that time, Vander Wiele and Cooper made a pact.
“We had a conversation about how if they break up, if it’s not meant to be, we have to maintain our friendship,” Vander Wiele says.
Maggie, who lives in Florida, credits their moms for never pressuring them to get together — no matter how much they may have wanted it to happen..
“They never made comments or tried to embarrass us, they were just like, ‘We’re gonna step back and let the Lord guide them,” Maggie says. “The prayers paid off. He wanted us to be together."
As excited as Vander Wiele is to become a grandmother with her BFF, she wants Maggie and Malachi to take their time, emphasizing that at 20 years old, they are still young.
"They do talk about it a little," Maggie says with a laugh. "Our moms are like, 'We're going to share grandbabies!' I think it's pretty cool that when they look at our kids, they'll see a little bit of themselves in them."
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