Sunday, 26 June 2011
-
50 Years of Driving Each Other Crazy
In the early 1940s, my great aunt (then in her early 20s), wed my great uncle. They were happily married for nearly 50 years until his passing in 1989. I never got to witness how much the two loved each other, but I know they certainly must have to have been married for so many years.After he died, my great aunt didn't quite know what to do with herself. She's always been the kind of woman who is happy when she takes care of others. She hates to be alone and she hates to be helped by anybody else. When I was a baby, she met a man at a party who was three years her senior. I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but he moved in to her house and for the past almost 20 years they have been living together.
He's not the stand up guy my real great uncle was. He's not a doctor, he's not a good father, he's often not appreciative, but they have a companionship most people dream of. He is now 95 and (hopefully) recovering from pneumonia and she visits him every single day. Not only does she visit, but she spends the day with him even though he spends most of it sleeping.
When I was three, my grandfather passed away. Until I was 8 years old, I watched my grandmother miss him more than I've ever seen someone miss anybody else. She wore her wedding ring on a necklace and she kissed it all the time. She kept their old photos everywhere in her house. She talked about him fondly all the time.
They, too, were married for many many years. Again, I never really got to see them as a married couple, but what's interesting is what I've been told: they couldn't stand each other. They were madly in love, but they drove each other completely crazy. After he died, she never seemed to recall on those moments. She remembered him for what he was: the love of her life. When I was little, I used to think she died of a lonely and broken heart.
What do you think about couples who stay married for so long? Will we start to see less and less of these kinds of marathon marriages?
RecommendRelated Posts
Post a Comment
- Back to datingish's Datingish Site!
- Note: your comment will appear in datingish's local time zone: GMT -05:00 (Eastern Standard - US, Canada)
About the Author
-
- From: TheDailyDane
- About Me: I'm Dane and I'm 20. Follow me on Twitter @danefeldman. I am a huge supporter of long-term relationships. What's the fun in knowing something will end in a week? Stick around for some long-term bloggin'.
Stats: This Week All Time Posts: 0 82 Views: 0 280949 Comments: 0 2595 View all posts by TheDailyDane
Comments (46)
There is a good chance, I believe, we will see more of them.
I think it's because of the effects that the short-lived marriages in the post baby-boom years have had on the children. As those children grow up and deal with the issues of being juggled between divorced parents, they'll probably come to the conclusion that they don't want THEIR children to go through the same crap they did.
I know not all children of divorcees have had bad experiences growing up in such families, but I know that there are enough of them out there that it could fundamentally shift the way marriage is viewed in our society.
Further reinforcing this is the way our economy is in shambles, and may be so for the foreseeable future. A bad economy means people are more likely to stay in marriages, if not for the romantic bond, then at least for economic stability. Divorces are not cheap.
But what do I know... I'm just a talking bunny-eared skull.
marathon marriages are precious. I sure hope that we start to see more of them, considering the sky-high divorce rate we have right now. and I plan on having one myself :) maybe it won't be as long if I die early but I certainly think that I'll get married once and stay with that person til death do us part.
@QuantumStorm@xanga - That's an interesting notion, however studies would disagree. There is a correlation between being a child of divorce and a higher risk of that child getting a divorce once they are older and married. So actually what should be occurring based on these studies is that more divorces will occur in the future.
@PopStar48@xanga - Yeah, I've heard that too. Do you have any studies specifically in mind that you can ref?
My great grandparents were married for years upon years upon years. Then my great grandfather died. My great grandmother died nearly a year after that. My grandparents say that she couldn't bear to be away from him any longer and that her body just gave up the will to live without him.
I want to have a marriage like that. Not necessarily the die within one year of each other part, but newly in love every day for decades.
i hope not! let them keep coming. =) my parents have been married for 23 years now. theyre hilarious together! you can see the adoration between the two and obviously the disgust. lol. but thats life. my grandparents were married since they were 17 and unfortunately my grandpa died in 08 at 76. that was a long ass marriage. full of ups and downs but they loved each other madly. =)
@PopStar48@xanga - I agree with that. Children with divorced parents many times don't have healthy relationships to draw examples from and end up making the same mistakes their parents made.
My own parent's relationship isn't healthy and they're still married...none of my relationships have been that great and a lot of it is because of my own parent's example. I find myself doing the same bad relational habits that they do.
My own grandparents are like that. They drive each other crazy but now that my grandmother is really sick, my grandpa isn't doing so well himself. I have a feeling that once she dies, he will go shortly after.
Divorce is so acceptable and common now that marathon marriages aren't as common as they used to be.
@QuantumStorm@xanga - Whatever studies say I agree with you.
My parents marriage ended in divorce. My dad cheated on my mother, they fought constantly and my mother isn't the type of person who can stand easily on her own two feet without someone there. So I've seen the struggles of bad relationships up close many times and I do not want that happening to me. Having a good relationship with my partner stands out even more for me because of my past.
"Marathon marriages" don't exist, imo. Every marriage should be a "marathon marriage". Has commitment gotten so unheard of that we now have to put the word "marathon" on any couple who's been married for more than 30 years? I thought that was supposed to be the end result of any marriage.
I thought marathons had endings.
@QuantumStorm@xanga - as a child of divorced parents, i just want to say that the "stay together for the kids" notion is the dumbest thing a married couple can do. nothing is going to give a kid a more disturbed view of marriage than knowing their own parents are stuck together, apparently miserable, and it's all their fault. children can function just fine without a two-parent household in the present day.
i'm just really against two people being together for any reason other than love. as a society, i thought we had progressed beyond marriage being a necessary rite of passage into adulthood. you shouldn't be with someone unless you love them. and if you wake up one day and realize you don't, there shouldn't be any shame in ending the relationship (regardless of what stage it is at). if anything, i hope that our generation's experience with marriage and divorce teaches us to avoid getting married unless we really believe it can work, and to never get married for convenience, having babies, or social benefits.
@too_pretty_to_die@xanga - Well my point is that people would be more careful to avoid such marriages in the first place, which meant they spent more time discerning a good, stable partner before taking the plunge.
"as a society, i thought we had progressed beyond marriage being a necessary rite of passage into adulthood."
Since when was marriage considered as such in the first place?
@QuantumStorm@xanga - Some ancient cultures considered marriage sacred and a mark of adulthood. (Most were old Celtic/Britannic civilizations though, and I THINK some Hindu castes.)
@bloggicus_maximus@xanga - Yeah but did that really carry over into the modern era? I dunno but then again I'm not a history/sociology buff.
@QuantumStorm@xanga - As far as modern Christianity goes, it did. Islam, too. Actually, most monotheistic religions view marriage as a rite of passage-sign of adulthood. It's silly, really, but that's just the way things have been for thousands of years.
@bloggicus_maximus@xanga - Well with Christianity, I was wondering about clerical rites of passage which involved celibacy, eg: priesthood, etc. Hence my doubts.
@QuantumStorm@xanga - in my family, it definitely has been for the past couple of generations. my grandmother graduated high school, got married, and had her first kid all in the same year. one of her siblings once referred to it as the trifecta of adulthood. and the fact that my mom waited until age 30 to get married caused my maternal grandmother quite a lot of stress.
but i was thinking of the history of marriage as a whole. throughout most of history, perpetual bachelorhood has been unacceptable in society. a great example of it is the concept of the spinster. marriage was often not of your own choosing, but rather a great tool for your family to gain a greater footing in society. it was incredibly rare, and often socially awkward, for someone in even just their early 20s to not be at least betrothed yet.
@too_pretty_to_die@xanga - Ah, I see where you're going with it. The spinster concept, to my knowledge, is more of a negative connotation regarding females, though. I'm guessing it's more of a gender-related thing? (Eg: a bachelorette is seen as a potential spinster or "defective goods" whereas a bachelor is seen as someone who is focused on his career or w/e, maybe a social wrist-slap but nothing as bad as a spinster)
@QuantumStorm@xanga - Celibacy is a Catholic thing. Goes back centuries, despite nothing being mentioned of it in the Bible.
@bloggicus_maximus@xanga - Oh, it's mentioned in the Bible. It's also an Orthodox thing, and Christianity was largely just the Catholics until the Schism in the 1000s or so, and followed by the Reformation in the 1500s, so celibacy does have so pretty strong historical roots in the Christian tradition.
@QuantumStorm@xanga - Really? Huh. I always thought it was just something Paul came up with. (Simon Peter had a wife before he became a disciple if I remember correctly.)
@QuantumStorm@xanga -http://unews.utah.edu/old/p/021406-20.html http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/4102.0Main+Features40Sep+2010
My grandparents just had their 48th anniversary and they're still incredibly in love. It's the cutest thing I've ever seen.
@PopStar48@xanga - It's giving me a broken link.