Thirty years ago this week, on May 2, 1989, the Cure released the magnum opus that Kyle from South Park once rightfully declared "the best album EVER!" While the Cure's epic eighth studio effort, Disintegration, was among the band's gloomiest and doomiest (frontman Robert Smith always considered it an unofficial companion to 1982's intensely, brutally dark Pornography), it ironically yielded the band's sweetest — and most commercially successful — single, "Lovesong."

The Cure broke out of the post-punk underground in the mid-'80s with The Head on the Door and their double-disc follow-up, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. But it was 1989's Disintegration — the culmination of all of Smith's stylistic experiments, simultaneously gorgeous and raw, melancholy and exuberant, grandiose and intimate — that transformed the Cure into stadium headliners. After slugging it out with a revolving Cure lineup since 1976, Robert Smith — with his spidery hair and trademark smeared scrawl of crimson lipstick — had somehow become one of music's most unlikely and reluctant rock stars.

And all along the way, a girl named Mary Poole, who inspired "Lovesong" and soon after that became Mrs. Smith, had been by Robert's side.

Smith met Mary Poole when he was just 14 years old at St. Wilfrid's Comprehensive School in Crawley, England, when he drummed up the nerve to ask her to be his partner in a drama-class project. "I just struck lucky early on," he told The Guardian in 2004. According to an interview he conducted with the publication Lime Lizard in 1991, it was Mary's lack of confidence in his future as a musician that instilled in Smith the drive to make the Cure (originally the Easy Cure) successful. And almost 15 years after they met, a very successful Robert penned "Lovesong" as his wedding present for Mary. The two exchanged vows on Aug. 13, 1988, and are still together, their rock 'n' roll marriage bucking the odds and showing no signs of, well, disintegrating.

A photo, which has gone viral, of Mary Smith watching the Cure's induction speech at the 2019 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony. (Photo: HBO) More

"It's an open show of emotion," Robert told journalist Jeff Apter at the time of "Lovesong's" release. "It's not trying to be clever. It's taken me 10 years to reach the point where I feel comfortable singing a very straightforward love song. In the past, I’ve always felt a last-minute need to disguise the sentiment. ...I couldn’t think of what to give her, so I wrote her that song — cheap and cheerful. She would have preferred diamonds, I think, but she might look back and be glad that I gave her that.” (Mary’s wedding gift to her new husband was reportedly a platinum heart.)

Robert Smith & Mary Poole's wedding day (1988) pic.twitter.com/xZPNvl0VmM — Classic Alternative (@altclassic) September 1, 2016

While not much is known about the reclusive Smiths' personal lives, Mary seems to be as eccentric as her husband; Robert once told The Face magazine that she "used to dress as a witch to scare little children," and he described her as "mental." More seriously, he told Pop magazine in 1996: "Mary means so incomprehensibly much to me. I actually don't think she has ever realized how dependent I've been of her during all these years we've been together. She's always been the one that has saved me when I have been the most self-destructive, she's always been the one that has caught me when I have been so very close to falling apart completely, and if she would have disappeared — I am sorry, I know that I'm falling into my irritating, miserable image by saying it — then I would have killed myself."

But Robert's other occasional comments about his wife to the press have been — and this isn't a word most would usually employ to describe the spooky, frightwigged singer — downright adorable.