Sharon, Okla. — If it wasn’t for Facebook, sweethearts Chuck Crites and Tina Ramsey “don’t see how we would’ve ever met again.”

The two first met and became friends almost three decades ago.

In 1982, Ramsey (her maiden name) and her first husband moved from Missouri to the Woodward area looking for job opportunities.

“I had a friend that lived here who was telling me about all the money to be made down here and that’s why we moved here in the first place,” she said.

They didn’t exactly find what they were looking for, but her husband did find a job at a local grocery store.  It was there that her husband met and befriended Crites who was a coworker.

“We butchered at United together,” Crites said.  “We were real good friends.”

That friendship soon extended to include Ramsey and her two young children.

In fact, Crites became such a close friend of the family that the children became “like a niece and nephew to me.”

But then in 1989, Ramsey and her family made the decision to move back to Missouri.

And that would be the last that Ramsey and Crites would see or hear of each other for 20 years as they pursued their lives in different parts of the country.

Ramsey had another child in the intervening years and eventually got divorced.  She moved a couple of times, spending “the past 17 years or so living in Wisconsin and Illinois.”

Throughout it all, though, she would still think of Crites from time to time and wonder what kind of path his life had taken.

Not knowing if he ever married (he hadn’t), she didn’t feel comfortable  with trying to track down a phone number and call him.

“I didn’t want to call because I didn’t know if he had a wife and I didn’t want to encroach,” Ramsey said.

But then social networking sites became popular and she joined Facebook, which promises to help “you connect and share with the people in your life.”

Ramsey thought it would be a great way to reconnect with people from her past, something she was desperately seeking after she lost many of her family members and her best friend through death.

She said she had been on the site looking for friends from her youth, relations she had lost track of and other former acquaintances she was just curious to see if they were on Facebook as well.

“I was bored one day and just searching names and his name (Crites) just popped into my head,” Ramsey said.

She typed in his name, found a profile that looked like it might have been his and sent him a message asking if he was the Chuck Crites that she had known who used to work as a butcher at United. (He now works as a truck driver and she is a homemaker and entrepreneur.)

“His response was, ‘I sure am,’” Ramsey said, noting that after she determined from his profile that he was single, she then began to ask him more questions about how things had been for him.

“He would only send back these short little lines, so I told him once ‘you can write more, I want to know about how the family and everybody is doing,’” she said.

Ramsey said the reconnection was almost instant as the two caught up.  She noted that they quickly discovered how much they had in common, “we shared so many interests and likes and dislikes.”

“It definitely felt like I had found a long-lost friend and quite possibly my soul mate,” Ramsey wrote when entering her romance story for

The News’ “How I Met My Sweetheart” contest, which the couple recently won.

Crites said he felt the same.

“I was ecstatic,” he said about hearing from her for the first time after 20 years, noting that for as much as she had been looking for somebody, he had been too.

But what began as renewing an old friendship quickly blossomed into a romance.

Ramsey said she was telling Crites about how when her mother came to visit the family back in the 1980s, her mother said she thought that Crites had a crush on her.  She said that at first Crites didn’t admit to it but “then he said, ‘maybe I did and maybe I still do.’”

“I remember saying that as plain as day,” he said.

For the first couple of months, they communicated almost solely through Facebook and the Internet.

It was a busy time in Ramsey’s life as she was helping to plan her daughter’s wedding.  But once the wedding was over, she said she called Crites and then they were on the phone constantly.

That’s how they made their long distance relationship work, though, she said, noting that she was living in Wisconsin at the time and he was living in Sharon.

“We talked on the phone every day, several times a day,” Ramsey said.

“Seems like we’d talk all day,” Crites said.

Soon Ramsey made plans to come visit for a week over the Thanksgiving holidays.

“I stayed three weeks,” she said, noting that “by the end of the three weeks, I think we both knew we wanted to be together.”

“I sent her home to pack up,” Crites joked.

“ Basically that’s what I did,” Ramsey said.  “I spent December packing and getting things together and I moved down here on Jan. 11.”

In the interim, an important event happened.  Crites proposed on New Year’s Day.

He said he had been thinking about it since the two made their relationship exclusive a few months before.

“I knew I wanted to do it on New Year’s because it’s the first day of the year,” he said.

Since the proposal was over the phone, it was relatively simple, but nevertheless heartfelt and touching.

“I just called her up and said, ‘I know I haven’t officially asked you to marry me,’ and she said ‘the answer is officially yes,’” Crites said.

The couple have plans to marry later this year.  Ramsey said they haven’t set a date yet because one of her sons is supposed to be redeployed to Iraq and they are waiting to hear more about that before scheduling the wedding.

Even though the couple reconnected through Facebook, they both believe that it was actually God who brought them back together, especially since both of them had been involved with the whole Internet dating scene before and nothing had really worked out for them.

“I feel like God sent her to me,” Crites said.  “She’s my one.  I know it.”