That's because the Louisville couple have been married three times during their 16 years together, but instead of remarrying on the same day, they picked a new one for each trip down the aisle.“We've never split up. We've been married three times in three different states. If she does ever decide to leave me, it's going to be difficult to unravel all that,” Chris said with a laugh, sitting next to his wife in the living room of their eastern Jefferson County home.
Chris, who is from Cincinnati and is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, was in the Navy and living in San Diego when he first crossed paths with Tiffany in 1993. She was a registered nurse from Ventura, Calif., who was also living in San Diego while trying to land a nursing job in San Francisco.
“I was like, ‘Who is that guy?'” Tiffany remembered about their first meeting. “We met and we just got to talking that night. We liked each other, and he asked me out on a date.”
The couple instantly became smitten with one another, but about a year into their courtship, Chris decided he was ready to get out of the Navy. He ended up taking a job with Ford Motor Co., which meant relocating to Plymouth, Mich.
“We weren't married at the time, and we weren't even engaged at the time. I was like, ‘OK, what's going to happen here with this?' ” Chris said.
Tiffany wasn't about to pack up her bags and follow Chris without a sparkly engagement ring on her finger to seal the deal. Chris already knew she was “The One,” but he hadn't popped the question yet. Instead, “I took all of her stuff and brought it to Michigan with me,” he said.
Tiffany stayed behind. “I knew he was going to propose at some point, but he never talked about it. He danced around the whole thing,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘Should he have my stuff? Should he not have my stuff?' ”
Within two weeks, Tiffany and her mom planned a wedding and she loaded up her car and moved to Michigan to be with Chris. They set the date for July 8, 1995.
Things took an exciting and surprising turn about seven months before the wedding on New Year's Eve 1994. Chris and Tiffany planned a holiday ski trip to Lake Tahoe with another couple. When they got there they realized their friends had also recently gotten engaged.
The guys had joked among themselves that the two couples should elope over New Year's. Tiffany remembers riding on the ski lift with Chris when he turned to her and said, ‘Do you want to get married this weekend just for fun?' ”
“We can do this and have the church wedding and nobody will know. So we got married at Love's Wedding Chapel by Rev. Love with me in my black, sequined New Year's Eve dress.”
The funny part was the other couple got married on a whim, too. “So on our honeymoon night and on their honeymoon night, we shared the same (hotel) room because we just had one room,” Chris said.
“We chose to come clean and say we are married, but we still wanted to get married in the church,” Tiffany said. “It caused an uproar.”
They ended up carrying on with their original plans. The couple wed in a Presbyterian church on July 8, 1995, in Tiffany's hometown of Ventura. She wore the same dress her mother wore on her wedding day.
“There was immense tension that there was going to be a massive uproar, but there wasn't … everything went beautifully … it went great,” Tiffany said.
But the couple weren't done walking down the aisle just yet. In between their first and second weddings, Tiffany converted to Catholicism, Chris' religion, because they knew they wanted to raise their children in the Catholic Church.
“When people ask us how long we've been married, we have to calculate different times according to who we're talking to,” Tiffany said.
The couple have two daughters, Brianna, 11, and Michelle, 9. Ironically, both girls were born on one of their parents' wedding anniversaries — Brianna on July 8 and Michelle on Dec. 31.
It was in March that the couple experienced one of their biggest challenges so far. Chris was down the street sitting around a fire pit and chatting with neighbors. He stood up to walk home and accidentally tripped over a chair, which caused him to fall on the driveway and hit the back of his head.
He had fractured his skull and suffered a brain injury. “I knew he was going to live, but I wondered if I had lost my best friend,” Tiffany said, while tearing up as she recalled that Friday evening a few months ago.
Chris spent six days in the hospital and was off work for several weeks. Although he doesn't remember much about that fateful night, he has made what doctors are calling a “miraculous” recovery. “I had a good person taking care of me,” he said of his wife.
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