HIGH POINT, N.C. — On the summer night Ellen Gerber and Pearl Berlin committed to spending their lives together, the No. 1 song was “When A Man Loves A Woman.”

Lyndon B. Johnson was president. NASA had just landed the first unmanned probe on the moon.

“We’re still in love, after 48 years,” Gerber, better known as Lennie, said recently. “We still can’t begin the day without a good cuddle.”

June 2, 1966, is engraved in Roman numerals on the identical gold bands the women exchanged during a religious wedding at their Greensboro, N.C., synagogue last year on the anniversary of that long-ago night. They followed three months later with a civil ceremony in Maine.

But under North Carolina law, they might as well be strangers.