Fools are NOT limited to April.

It has been just over twenty years since my maternal grandmother died. My youngest daughter was just two weeks old when it happened and I remember that I was awakened from a much needed nap to receive the news. The date was April 1, 1994. Less than a month earlier I had turned 31. Less than a month following, I would throw in the towel on my third marriage.

When I think about my grandmother (that was what I was instructed to call her, "Grandmother"), I remember a woman that had a great deal of determination and a bit too much self pity. My maternal grandparents were married well over fifty years, I think closer to fifty-five years. In the thirty-one years I witnessed, they did not like each other. They put up with each other to go visit the "kids and grand kids."  They tolerated each other, to attend church together at different intervals during my lifetime. Individually, they seemed to enjoy life, but I never felt comfortable around the two of them together. I can not ever recall a time that my grandmother did not complain about my grandfather during a conversation. She did not respect her husband. Her example of "sticking it out" in marriage, helped me determine that I had to divorce.

During the time I was a bartender at a neighborhood "watering hole," I watched multiple marriages crumble, and I saw hundreds that were successful. The successful marriages had a few things in common. The husband loved his wife and smiled when she approached or when he spoke of her, and though he drank a drink or two, he was not an alcoholic. The wife knew her husband and trusted him and respected his decision to end his work day with a beer or mixed drink, before heading home. In the case of some of the older folks they would come in together or meet each other at "cocktail hour."  One couple, I remember vividly, did not drink alcohol at all, but three times a week they would meet their friends and chat over a glass of tonic and lime.

I believe in love. Though I do not believe one person's love will make a marriage successful, I have seen marriages last with only one of the spouses able to put forth any effort of loving the other. A friend of mine that has never married, told me a few weeks ago that his grandfather gave him advice to marry a woman that loved him, because if he married a woman he loved, she could break his heart. This is sad advice in my way of thinking. To my knowledge, everyone wants to be loved.

Interestingly, the Bible instructs husbands to love their wives and instructs wives to respect their husbands. Could it be that if a wife respects her husband, love will follow? Perhaps, if a husband loves his wife, as he loves himself, they will have a successful marriage. It is certainly something I want my youngest daughter to consider before she walks down the aisle. Until Later ~ Rita Darlene