They first met while attending camps across the lake from each other. Homer's camp is for underprivileged boys, and Marge's is for rich, privileged girls. Homer finds her retainer and they first speak through a kitchen wall, where they agree to meet late that night. Homer is wearing an eye patch because of a switchblade accident, while Marge's hair is flat and brown from burning it with an iron. (Both accidents occurred while they were trying to prepare for their date.) It's somewhat awkward for them at first, but they end up sharing their first kiss with each other (cue the love song and paradisaical images). Homer gives her a rock shaped like a heart, and it's all very sweet and cute. When Homer doesn't arrive at their next date the night after, Marge, absolutely heartbroken, throws the heart-shaped rock and breaks it in two. She takes half to remind her of how cruel boys can be, and Homer later finds and keeps the other half to remind him of the girl he loved. (They rejoin the pieces of their heart years later as a married couple.)

Years later, in high school, Marge Bouvier was a good, responsible student and becoming a strong-willed feminist. Homer was one of the guys who spent the whole day eating a ton of unhealthy junk food, getting stoned in the bathroom, and getting in trouble. They meet at detention one day, after Homer's been caught getting stoned (again) and Marge led a rally where she set her tissue-paper-filled bra on fire (another love song while she walks into the room in slow motion). Homer goes to great lengths to win the heart of a girl that he realizes is out of his league, joining the debate team and learning passable French, before he asks her to go to senior prom with him. She agrees, after which Homer admits that he doesn't actually take French. She gets mad at him for lying and keeping her up late that night when she has a debate competition the next day, so Marge ends up going with Artie Ziff, a man practically the antithesis of Homer.

Homer goes to the prom by himself, still clinging to the hope that Marge will be there and give him another chance. When Marge catches him crying in the hallway. She asks why he's putting himself through this and he explains that he thought they were destined to be together. Homer walks home, since he has run out of money for the limo, while Marge's date ends badly. She drives back to find him, and after they've driven back to one of their houses, Homer says "I've got a problem. Once you stop this car, I'm going to hug you, and kiss you, and then I'll never be able to let you go. *cut to present day* And I never have."

As much as they love each other, their marriage is horrible. Homer's a lazy, grotesque, deadbeat, alcoholic child-abuser that never remembers his wife's birthday, their anniversary, or Marge's eye color. And once again, just like always, Marge is out of his league, but even she has been broken down into your average, beaten-down, unappreciated housewife and people-pleaser. They have the epitome of a dysfunctional family, from the ne'er do well son and never understood too-intelligent daughter to the almost-curselike perpetuity of their squalid conditions.

The real clincher- they would have had better lives with other people. They are constantly given a choice or shown an alternate reality where they are happy and rich with another person, and their alternate life has virtually no problems and certainly none of the major problems their real life encases. But Homer will always choose an ill-conditioned life with Marge over a rich, childless life with the attractive coworker that was just like him and always on his mind. And Marge will always stay with Homer, regardless of alcoholism, unattractiveness, and temptation from better-looking, charming men.

And they still love each other. They live happily together, choosing to look past all of their problems and see the love song Homer wrote for her when they were young or the Christmas when Marge sympathetically gave Homer a present for him to give to her as a Christmas present- a picture of the two of them together that they were both happy with. A love like theirs endures through anything and everything, amnesia and death and explosions and who knows what, and becomes all the stronger for going through it.

<3 HS+MB=LOVE <3