72 years of love: How one couple saved their marriage with 36,000 love letters

By Nanci Dixon
(Note: This was originally published on RVtravel.com on February 10, 2024. Some numbers have been updated. But be sure to read to the bottom for the hilarious [uncensored 🫣] update from Joe as of February 12, 2025.)
Update: As of February 2026, Joe and Helen are still writing love letters to each other every day!

This good-news story is about how longtime RVtravel.com readers Joe and Helen Hesketh, from Bellevue, WA, saved their marriage with tenacity, commitment and more than 36,000 love letters. As they celebrate 72 years together (72nd wedding anniversary coming up this June), they share a very special tale of finding love again.

Joe and Helen met when Joe was still in high school. He had no car, so when he finished with work, he would step out of the grocery store, put up a thumb and hitch a ride home. One special day, it was Helen who picked him up. What Joe didn’t know until 20 years later is that Helen was waiting around the corner, hoping to be the first one to offer Joe a ride that day. As they say, the rest is history… but not quite.

It was to be “happily married ever after,” but with the rigors of eight kids and Joe always working, Helen was anything but happy. She was ready to call it quits, but asked a reluctant Joe to try a Marriage Encounter Retreat.

It was there that a change happened—a momentous change. A long, enduring change for both of them. They were asked to write a letter to each other and then read it to each other. It was that seemingly simple exercise that brought the change they and their marriage needed. As Joe says, that weekend he “fell in love again.”

Since that moment more than 50 years ago, they write each other a letter every day. They write of the specialness that each other has, of the everyday events of their lives, and of their deep, enduring love for each other.

Theirs is a story of 72 years of marriage and 52 years of love letters—more than 37 of them carefully saved in boxes and boxes of spiral notebooks. All are a testament to not giving up, staying the course and filling each and every day with love.

Here’s a more recent picture of these lovebirds:

Oh, and they have 8 kids, 35 grandkids, and 43 great-grandchildren with two more on the way! And Joe and Helen are both 93 (in Feb. 2026), BTW.

Watch their heartwarming story on KOMO News here.

*****
(From original post in 2024) Hi, Joe and Helen. Surprise! When I emailed you last week to say that I saw your interview with Eric Johnson (Eric’s Heroes) on KOMO News online, you said you didn’t want to tell (i.e., bother) me about it because it didn’t mention RVing.🤔 And now look where you are! You two are just so darned adorable! (In addition to being an inspiration.) Take care. 🤗 —Diane

*****
From Diane (Feb. 12, 2025):
I contacted Joe by email a couple of days ago to get some updated info before we reran this heartwarming love story. We emailed back and forth a couple of times, and then Joe sent me an email the morning of Feb. 12 and asked me to phone him if I was free. I immediately called him and he answered the phone with: “What took you so long?!”

We had a nice chat, but after we hung up I realized I had forgotten to ask him if he and Helen still write letters to each other every day, at least when one or the other wasn’t in the hospital for various medical issues. I emailed that question to him, and here is Joe’s (uncensored) response, which he sent me by email late Wed. night:

Briefly, we write every day. Some letters have been written in emergency rooms when in the hospital. We bring our notebooks. Some have been written on paper menus in restaurants. Most of the time it’s a one-page letter written on a subject of our choice about God, sex, possessions, death, etc., and we focus on how we feel about the subject, and we learn a lot.

One time we decided to have sex before we wrote our letters. When we woke up the next morning, I, Joe, said we did not write our letters last night, and Helen said we did not have sex either. So we had two letters to write that day – one in the morning and the other in the evening.

40 years ago, Joe was in the hospital awaiting a quadruple heart surgery. We wrote and shared our letters before Helen went home. That evening I wrote Helen a 4-page letter telling her how much I loved her and that if I should not make it through the surgery that she should find someone else to marry, etc. Then I wrote 3 pages of how to empty the RV holding tanks.

Fortunately, my operation was a success and she never had to use those pages.

The day after my surgery I scribbled in my letter thanking God that I was still alive.
Joe & Helen

RVT1248