Mike Johnson was a young law student at Louisiana State University when he met Kelly Lary, a bright and kind-hearted woman who shared his deep Christian faith. By all accounts, the two clicked instantly. “It was like I’d known her my whole life,” Mike once said in an interview. “She had this light about her — and I just knew.” Three weeks later, he told her exactly that. “I told her I loved her,” he recalled. “And I meant it. It scared us both a little, but we knew where it was leading.”

That conviction defined everything that followed. The pair began planning a future together grounded in the same principles that would later shape Mike’s political life — faith, family, and commitment. When they married in 1999, they did something few couples in America had ever done: they chose a covenant marriage, a legally binding union that makes divorce far more difficult. Only a handful of states, including Louisiana, recognize covenant marriages, and the process requires premarital counseling and a mutual declaration that the marriage is for life.

For Mike and Kelly, the decision wasn’t symbolic — it was sacred. “From a woman’s perspective,” Kelly once said on television, “I wanted to know it was for a lifetime. That if things got hard, we were going to fight for it, not walk away.”