Neal McCoy + Melinda Williams — Country’s Greatest Love Stories

It's been 40 years since Neal McCoy said "I do" to his wife, Melinda Williams -- after their romance began in a shoe store. The very first time that McCoy laid eyes on Williams, he was working at his first job, at a shoe store in the mall, and she was working at another store.

"She came in the shoe store with her mother. And I just thought, 'Oh my gosh, who is this girl? She’s the prettiest girl in the world,'" McCoy tells Taste of Country. "She had to be. I’d never seen anybody prettier."

McCoy then got to know "the prettiest girl in the world." He later met her at a discotheque, asked her to dance -- and was promptly shot down, when she told him, “No, I don’t dance with guys I don’t know on slow songs.” The singer endured some ribbing from his buddies, but an hour later, on the next fast song, things changed.

"She came over and said, 'Well, you still wanna dance?'" McCoy recalls. "And, of course ... I went and danced with her, and we’ve been dancing ever since."

Through their more than three decades of marriage, McCoy has learned a lot about relationships.

"I don’t know that there is one secret. I think it’s just a give-and-take kind of thing," he tells Country Weekly. "You have to choose your battles. You can’t just fight over everything. Once you’re married a little while, you kind of figure it out."

He adds, "Who cares if you’re not putting the lid on the toothpaste? It doesn’t matter. I think you just figure that out, and the longer you stay together, I think the little things — you just don’t pay as much attention to them. In my business, it’s the spouse that deserves all the credit if a marriage stays together."

The couple has two children: a son named Swayde and a daughter named Miki. They also have two grandchildren, Titan and Dash.

And, clearly, McCoy and Williams are still smitten with each other. In 2014, year, on Facebook, McCoy raved, "I got married to Melinda Williams 33 years ago today. Just a young girl who liked a ladies' shoe salesman, unaware that I one day wanted to sing for a living ... 33 years later, I am singing for a living, still married to that same young girl who has now given us two wonderful children with their own lives, and minds and hearts of their own. Oh yeah, and the cutest grandson in the world!!! Happy anniversary, Melinda McGaughey ... I love you!!!"