Joy-Anna Duggar isn’t counting the years between her and husband Austin Forsyth. 

The 19 Kids and Counting couple shares a four-year age gap, having tied the knot when Joy-Anna was 19 while Forsyth was 23, in a televised 2017 wedding. But the 28-year-old recently explained her feelings for her future husband blossomed much earlier. 

“We actually met when we were really young,” Joy-Anna told sister Jinger Duggar Vuolo on an Aug. 19 episode of the Jinger & Jeremy Podcast, noting, “I was 4, and he was 8 when they moved up from Texas.”

Still, their love story would take some time to get started after the 32-year-old’s family switched churches.

“His family, they had visited wherever we were having church,” Joy-Anna continued. “Then they went and had a different church, and we didn’t see each other very often.”

However, Austin’s love for sports—a shared hobby with his wife’s brothers Josh, 38, John-David, 36, Joseph, 31 and Josiah, 29—ultimately brought them back together.

As Joy-Anna recounted, “He got his driver’s license and started playing football and broom ball with the boys,” adding that soon after, “I was 14, he was 18 when I started crushing hard.”