She Had Him At ‘Can I Have A Ride In Your Red Camaro?’

APPLE VALLEY, MN — Kevin Bettelli’s 1984 red Chevrolet Camaro caught his now wife Jenni’s eye before he did.

It was the fall of 1987, and both were students at the University of Northwestern in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The red muscle car shone on its own merits, but it also had Florida plates. Their college in a city with unforgiving harsh winters wasn’t a huge destination for people from the Sunshine state.

Jenni and her roommate wondered who the car might belong to as they admired it every day from their dorm room window. Jenni finally gave in to her curiosity.

“One night, I left a note asking if I could have a ride in his car,” Jenni told Patch in an online interview with the couple. “It was a cool-looking car, with Florida plates,” she added, laughing, “I thought he might be my ticket out of here.”

Instead, the note was Kevin’s ticket to Minnesota.

Jenni was the first girl he had ever kissed, and he fell in love hard — with her, but also the state where she lived.

“And I’m still in Minnesota,” Jenni said, not really complaining.

The Bettellis have built what by all accounts is a wonderful life in Apple Valley, defying statistically long odds they’d make it. They raised three children. All are in happy marriages, like their parents. They have five grandchildren and count themselves fortunate they’re still young enough to be kids with them. Kevin is 54. Jenni will be 55 next month.

It’s been a good ride. But not in Kevin’s Camaro.

‘All I Could Think Of Was Seeing Jenni’

He took the middle session off in Northwestern’s trimester schedule, and asked his parents if he could sell the car — a gift from his parents — so he could get back to his education. A 10-speed bicycle would get him where he needed.

“All I could think of was seeing Jenni,” he said. “They said ‘yes.’ They were on to me.”

Their journey as a couple began with its hardest chapter.

“He was just in the spring of his freshman year, and I found out I was pregnant,” Jenni said. “We were not married. It tore us apart for a while.”

“I was the father,” Kevin said. But he was also young. There was a lot to figure out. It was a difficult year, but they made their way back to one another, and when they married on Aug. 3, 1990, their 1-year-old son was in the wedding party.

“Statistically, we should have fallen apart,” Kevin said. “When you start in that order, the odds are not in your favor. A lot of people don’t make it.”

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study about a decade ago found divorce rates around 44 percent for women who had a premarital first birth. For men, it was even higher (48 percent).

Both Kevin and Jenni knew what a strong marriage looked like from their parents. But they were young. They dropped out of college, and Kevin got the kind of job he’d been dreaming about since he was 14 — with a company that produces high school yearbooks and takes class photos.

“We had people cheering us on,” Kevin said. “We surrounded ourselves with people we knew would invest in us, and sat under their tutelage and mentorship, people we sought out because they could help us grow as individuals, a couple and family. They helped us lay a strong foundation.”

The Bettellis “started out on rocky soil” for sure, Jenni said, and everything they did to ensure their marriage would work was deliberate.

“One thing I have always done is have somebody in my life who is five or 10 years, sometimes older, a good woman with strong morals and strong beliefs and strong foundations,” Jenni said. “I looked up to them and gleaned information from them, with questions like ‘How does your marriage work? How do you stay together when you’re so mad you don’t want to look at one another?’

“Not everybody has that,” she said, adding this advice, “Young married couples, always have someone like that. Family is wonderful, but family can be biased.”

Always Say ‘I Love You’

Kevin said support from the couple’s church community was invaluable, but he also applied the vocational and professional counseling he got through his job also helped him engage in his relationship in ways that strengthen it.

“One of the things that stands out,” he said, “is stopping, closing your mouth and biting your tongue. That in itself can stop a lot of heartache.

“We think we should speak our mind and have our say, but that can create conflict, take a small spark and start a big fire” if words are used carelessly, Kevin said.

Especially when tensions are high, “never let a day go by without saying ‘I love you.’ I don’t have to like him right then,” Jenni said, “but I love him.

“It’s a choice to say it,” she continued. “It ebbs and flows. It’s not something you feel always — when you feel you can’t look across the table at them. But you stay in it. You will never regret it. If you give up, you will never know what’s on the other side.”

The Bettellis are careful to stay out of their children’s marriages. Jenni has a bit of experience there. When she and Kevin were newly married, she went to her parents’ home after their first fight.

“Mom wouldn’t let me in the door,” she recalled. “She said, ‘Go home and talk to your husband.’

“Talk to your spouse; you’ve got to solve this with your spouse,” she says to her own kids.

“There’s a line,” Jenni explained. “You have to be careful not to be too involved in their marriage. With the exception of one of our kids, they’re reaching out to other people, those people in their lives they can bounce things off.”

‘The Kid In Us Still Lives’

Also in the Bettellis’ favor is that they’ve been good friends from the moment Jenni left the note on Kevin’s Camaro, a bond strong enough to withstand the test of the unplanned pregnancy.

“The key from the get-go: We were very good friends. We have fun together, and, yes, we got married young, but we kept having fun.”

That’s another piece of advice they give couples who wonder how they make a happy marriage look so easy.

Whether spontaneous weekenders close to home or planned vacations to Michigan’s Mackinac Island or a trip abroad, “we lived life like that,” Jenni said.

“It was normal to say, let’s pack our bags, take the dog and go to the North Shore or Wisconsin Dells,” Jenni said.

“We’ve done some great things, whether it’s a cool trip outside the country or a walk around Minnehaha Falls (in Minneapolis),” Kevin said. “Both are valuable and fun — just being silly together. The kid in us still lives. I think it will always live.”

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Their adventures are a how-to for their kids on how to keep love alive.

“We’ve encouraged all of our kids, always keep dating and investing in each other,” Kevin said. “Investing is time. Find enjoyment in spending time together, in spontaneity.”

Because the Bettellis were so young when they got married, they’ve grown up together.

“It’s still just as much fun,” Jenni added. “It feels natural and normal to be together.”

A Fun Car To Enjoy The Ride

And because it is, Kevin decided Jenni should have a fun car for their 32nd anniversary. A Tiffany Blue Mini Cooper would be fun, she said when he asked her about it last winter. The COVID-19 pandemic had turned the auto industry upside down, and the robin’s egg color would require a special order.

And then it hit him. He walked into Mauer Chevrolet and put in an order for a red Camaro, this one a convertible.

“I told Jenni I’d put the order in, but she didn’t believe me,” Kevin said. “So I brought home a bill of sale. She still didn’t believe me.”

But, as status reports from the dealership started to come in, “she started to believe me.”

The Camaro finally showed up at the dealership in June.

“It’s very fun. It’s a fun little car,” Jenni said. “His was a stick, so I couldn’t drive it. This one’s an automatic.”

The grandkids think it’s pretty cool that Nana and Pa have a sports car.

One of them calls the convertible “Lightning McQueen.”

Her car doesn’t look much like Montgomery “Lightning” McQueen, the protagonist of the animated Pixar franchise “Cars,” Jenni said, “but I love it that they think it is.”

And the couple’s 3-year-old granddaughter, who Jenni cares for three days a week, loves going for a ride in the car. “When the top comes down, she’s waving her hands and screaming ‘woo-hoo,’ ” the doting grandmother said.

Two bright red Camaros — one a 1980s muscle car and the other a sleek ragtop — bookend the first 33 years of this relationship. The convertible will take them on more adventures, more fun, and Kevin is pretty sure it’s a car that will have to be passed down through future generations of Bettelli descendants.

“We’re all a work in progress,” Kevin said. “I don’t think there’s ever a completion. If the journey was 5 miles long, we’re maybe 250 yards into it.”

Editor’s note: Through Valentine’s Day, Patch is featuring stories about couples who answered our informal Valentine’s Day love stories survey. We asked them how they met and their secrets to a happy relationship.