The Love Of Their Lives

On Valentine's Day - or even at other times of the year - do you ever wonder about "the one who got away"?

Maybe it was your first crush. Or maybe it was the first one you kissed or the first one you dated.

In a love story about one California couple, separated 58 years, CBS News Correspondent Hattie Kauffman reports on the enduring power of love and shows it's never too late to find that special person.

Newlyweds Otto and Betty Jean Sloan fell in love more than 60 years in a small Colorado town. Otto says Betty Jean was the first girl he ever kissed.

"When he kisses me now, I still feel the way I did then," said Betty Jean.

Most people do have very vivid recollections of their first loves, says Carin Rubenstein, a psychologist who surveyed women on that topic for Family Circle magazine.

"They have wonderful memories of their first love," she says. "It's an intense, very powerful time to fall in love for the first time."

In fact, 25 percent of the women who responded to the survey said they had married their first love.

That didn't happen to Betty Jean and Otto - at least not right away. They lost track of one another during World War II when Otto was stationed at Pearl Harbor. Believing Otto had died in the war, Betty Jean married someone else. Otto, hearing on his return from the war that Betty Jean had already wed, did the same. Over the 50 years each was married to another, their paths never crossed.

Still, Otto carried Betty Jean's picture in his wallet for more than half a century.

Otto's wife died in 1996; Betty Jean lost her husband in 1998. Then, with a stroke of luck that both say was heaven-sent, Otto's cousin contacted Betty Jean. Betty Jean asked, "Where's Otto?"

Four months later the two were married. "It's miracles that don't happen every other day," says a smiling Otto as he holds his wife's hand.

"I think it was in both of our hearts to find each other," Betty Jean says.

Both agree that there reunion was an example of "the good Lord's taking care of us."

Psychologist Rubenstein says most other first loves don't last very long - a year or less. "If Romeo and Juliet hadn't taken poison," she says, "they would have broken up after a year."

But the first love provides a powerful blueprint for the other loves that follow, she says.

Today, Otto and Betty Jean do almost everything together, even feeding the birds in the back yard of their home.

Betty Jean says it's the small courtesies she loves. "He still opens the door for me when we go anywhere," she says. "He still holds my hand and gets me on the right side of him when we're wlking. I mean, it's that respect, it's that honoring. And I love it; I adore it; I eat it up.

"I just - I feel like a queen when I'm with him."