Al Sager spent 65 years content being single, and across town in Bay City, Michigan, 76-year-old Susan Guc felt the same way about her own unmarried life. Neither one was looking for a partner. Then a cardiac rehab program put them in the same room, and this week, they got married.
Sager had been single throughout his adult life, and he told CBS News he had avoided relationships after watching them sour. Guc, meanwhile, had built a career as a nurse devoted to her patients, while Sager worked as a truck driver who was frequently on the road — two lives that left little room, or apparent desire, for romance. According to Guc, the two crossed paths in 2024 after both underwent heart procedures and landed in the same cardiac rehab program, a meeting she called a fluke.
A Rock With One Word Changed Everything
Guc was on a treadmill when she noticed Sager on a nearby exercise bike. To get his attention, she gave him a rock engraved with the word “smile.” Sager has his own version of events, telling the outlet that Guc threw the rock at him to get him to notice her — a small discrepancy in how the spark started, though both agree the rock did its job.
Guc has said she once thought she might be too old to find a partner. That thinking didn't hold. The two kept talking during rehab sessions, and what began as an unlikely gym encounter turned into a relationship neither had sought out at their respective ages.
'It's Never Too Late,' Groom Says
Sager and Guc married each other this week in Bay City, closing out decades of single life for both of them. Reflecting on finding love so late, Sager offered a simple takeaway: “Oh, absolutely, it's never too late.”
Their story runs against a backdrop of national data showing marriage later in life is still the exception rather than the rule. The share of U.S. adults 65 and older who had never married rose from 5.2% in 1990 to 6.6% in 2022, according to Bowling Green State University's National Center for Family & Marriage Research. Among men in that age group, the never-married share climbed from 4.7% to 6.9% over the same period, while the figure for women rose more modestly, from about 5.5% to 6.4%.
First marriages later in life remain rare nationally. The Pew Research Center found that in 2012, there were only 7 first-time newlyweds per 1,000 never-married adults ages 55 and older. The same research projected that a quarter of adults who were 25 to 34 in 2010 would still have never married by 2030 if existing trends continued.
For Sager and Guc, those odds didn't matter. Marriage records filed in Bay County have been kept since 1857, according to the Bay County Clerk, meaning the pair's union joins a long local record of residents tying the knot in the county — just a bit later, and a bit more unexpectedly, than most.
