Lance Winter
DRIFTWOOD — When Lynn Isaak and Mark Isaak entered the America's Favorite Couple contest, they thought it would be a fun way to celebrate 37 years of marriage. They didn’t expect to nearly win the competition and steal the hearts of thousands.
Their story began before they even realized it. The two met when Lynn’s father, an engineer, helped her land a summer internship.
At the time, engineering was still very much a male-dominated field and Lynn said that her father had concerns about what that career might look like for his daughter. When he helped arrange the internship, he wanted Lynn to experience what it was like to work in a professional office and be able to decide whether engineering was really the path she wanted to pursue. If she changed her mind, there was still time to pivot in her studies.
Instead, the internship had the opposite effect.
Lynn came away that summer even more certain that she wanted to become an engineer and follow in her father's footsteps, this time with her eyes wide open about what the profession would require.
As it turned out, the internship gave her another reason to stay the course: she met Mark.
For Lynn, it was love at first sight.
Her father's plan hadn't simply introduced her to engineering, it had introduced her to her future husband, too.
By the time they went on their first date, Lynn had already caught herself trying out Mark's last name with her own. Similarly, Mark looked out his office door and told his sister he was looking at the woman he was going to marry.
The first date wasn't exactly the stuff of romantic movies, the couple explained.
Mark initially suggested a Neil Diamond impersonator at the Ramada Inn in Clearwater. Then, he reconsidered. After a couple more attempts, he settled on something much simpler: he picked up Lynn at her house and they went to Chili's. Mark barely ate. Lynn happily devoured chicken tacos.
Afterward, they drove through a subdivision Mark had worked on as a land development engineer. The windows were down on his Chrysler Laser, conversation came easily and somewhere along the quiet roads, they heard an owl.
There was nothing flashy about the evening, they said, yet Lynn remembers thinking, quite clearly, that she was home.
On their second date, Mark was asking Lynn what month she would want to get married; twenty days later, they were engaged.
“Twenty days sounded a lot longer to us than it did to everyone else,” Lynn said.
Even Lynn's little brother seemed to know. Before Lynn had mentioned marriage to him, he blurted out, “They're getting married!”
Her father dropped his fork.
Thirty-seven years later, that whirlwind beginning still makes sense to the couple. The Isaaks' marriage has been shaped by the same willingness to take risks that marked their beginning.
They raised two sons, moved out-of-state without family nearby, built new communities and opened their home to Vilma, an exchange daughter from Finland, who became a permanent part of their family.
Mark recalled that Lynn was unfamiliar with raising boys, as she would repeatedly ask their sons whether they wanted to do something:
“Hey guys, do you want to go to the park?”
“Do you guys want to come with me, so we can buy both of you a suit?”
“Do you want to go visit your aunt and uncle over the summer?”
The answer, Mark said, was almost always the same: “No.”
So, he offered Lynn a different strategy: “I told Lynn, ‘I know boys. You can't ask them if they want to do something.’”
Instead, Mark would announce the plan: “Boys, bring your baseball stuff. We're going to the park” or “Hey guys, you're going to Blacksburg to visit your aunt and uncle this summer.”
Rarely did they object. Instead, they went and had a blast, said Mark. He said, laughing, that he may still be following that same philosophy himself.
Even Lynn has caught on because Mark noted that she doesn't always ask him before launching the Isaak family into its next adventure: she didn't ask before she entering them to win a trip to Chicago; she didn't ask before sending a tape to America's Funniest Home Videos; and she certainly didn't ask before entering them in America's Favorite Couple.
“She’s using my advice to her about our boys on me,” Mark said, jokingly.
Their careers have been intertwined, too. Both are transportation engineers and over the years they have been coworkers, clients and professional colleagues. They've also worked for different organizations, sometimes requiring boundaries around confidential information.
That experience has given them a rare perspective on each other.
Lynn has seen Mark not only as her husband and the father of their children, but as an engineer, leader, mentor and consultant.
The quality she said that has mattered most is his steadiness.
“He is extraordinarily dependable,” she said. “When something matters — whether it's our family, his work, someone he's mentoring or a commitment he has made — he shows up.”
Lynn, meanwhile, is the enthusiastic idea person, the one whose thoughts tend to “grow legs.”
For example, she came across the America's Favorite Couple competition through Instagram or email, thought it sounded fun and entered.
Mark didn't find out until Lynn was nearly ready to ask people to vote.
“By the way, I entered us in this contest,” she told him.
After 37 years, Mark said that he has plenty of practice at being a good sport about Lynn's ideas.
At first, they expected it simply to be fun, but then, they kept advancing — top 20, top 15, top 10, top 5 and into the Group Finals.
Along the way, Lynn began sharing stories from their life together, how they met, family adventures, old photographs, stories about Vilma and even their appearance on America's Funniest Home Videos. People started following the stories as much as the competition.
“That's when it stopped feeling like just a contest Mark and I had entered and started feeling like something a whole group of people had joined us in,” Lynn said.
From there, team Isaak was born.
The support has come from friends, neighbors, professional colleagues and people Lynn hadn't seen in years. It has even crossed borders, with friends and family connected to Lynn's business partner in Honduras joining in.
For Lynn, the experience has offered an unexpected reminder that community can stretch far beyond geography. Sometimes, it is simply the accumulation of relationships built over a lifetime, people who cross paths, stay connected and show up when least expected.
After 37 years, Lynn doesn't believe a strong marriage requires a complicated formula.
“I think one of the biggest things is that we genuinely like doing life together,” she said.
Most marriages, Lynn said, aren't made up of vacations and grand romantic gestures. They're work, errands, dinner, bills, raising children, solving problems and sitting together at the end of a long day.
They're also the unexpected decisions, the trips that don't go according to plan, the opportunities that appear out of nowhere and the ideas that Lynn brings home, sometimes after Mark has already learned that asking whether he wants to participate may not matter much.
The Isaaks have learned to give each other room to grow, too. Neither is the person they were at 20 or 25. They've changed careers, taken risks, raised children and moved through seasons of life they couldn't have imagined on their wedding day.
The Driftwood couple is still dreaming, still taking chances and still figuring things out together. They are still looking forward to the next adventure.
The couple who needed only 20 days to decide they wanted to spend their lives together spent nearly four decades proving the real story wasn't how quickly they fell in love. It’s how many ordinary days they have continued to choose each other.
The Isaaks finished America’s Favorite Couple in second place in their group. To read more about their story, visit americasfavcouple.org/2026/the-isaaks.
