Fifty years is a long time. Long enough to love, unlove, change, grow apart, begin again, make mistakes, forgive them, raise a family, grow old, and become completely different people from the teenagers you once were.
Carol and I had more than fifty years together, and somehow, through everything life put in front of us, I never stopped seeing the girl I first fell in love with.
We met in 1959. I was 16. Carol was 17. She was smart, beautiful, funny, and already thinking seriously about becoming a nurse. I was shy, awkward around girls, terrible at dancing, and considerably less impressive academically.
Then came a Luther League meeting, a hayride, and my chance to ask Carol out.
I took it. Thankfully, she said yes.
We Had to Learn How to Love
Our early romance was hardly perfect.
On our first date, Carol told me her hands were cold. Any reasonably romantic teenage boy would have understood what she meant and held them.
I offered her my gloves.
Somehow, she agreed to another date.
There were nervous phone calls, awkward kisses, movies, church activities, ice skating, and plenty of moments when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. But beneath all those teenage mistakes, something serious was happening.
We were getting to know each other.
Carol’s diary from those years recorded ordinary outings with me and, eventually, the realization that she really liked being together. By December 1959, she was writing about our first kiss.
I had already fallen hard.
Distance Put Our Relationship to the Test
Love becomes easier to talk about when the person is standing beside you. It gets more interesting when life puts 150 miles between you.
When I transferred to the University of Illinois in Champaign to finish my mechanical engineering degree, Carol was continuing nursing school. Long-distance telephone calls were expensive, and seeing each other regularly became difficult.
So we wrote letters.
Almost every day.
We wrote about school, family, loneliness, future plans, and ordinary events that would probably have seemed meaningless to anyone else. Sometimes my engineering studies left me with so little time that an entire letter could consist of a simple declaration that I loved her.
Those letters helped us remain part of each other’s daily lives. Even when we couldn’t sit together or hold hands, we could still tell each other, in our own words, “I’m here.”
Dating Became a Life Together
We dated for almost five years before marrying in June 1964. By then, we knew each other well enough to understand that marriage was going to involve much more than romance.
Life proved that very quickly.
There were careers, children, bills, family responsibilities, moves, celebrations, worries, mistakes, and ordinary evenings at home. We became parents and eventually grandparents. Carol spent more than thirty years working as a hospital nurse, caring directly for people who were sick, frightened, injured, or dying.
The glamorous teenage dates became everyday married life.
And I came to understand that everyday married life was where love mattered most.
Love was caring when somebody was tired. It was making room for family. It was staying close when life became inconvenient. It was knowing somebody for decades and still wanting that person beside you.
Growing Older Together
When you meet someone at 16, you cannot possibly imagine what they will look like at 30, 50, or 70.
You certainly cannot imagine illness.
Carol eventually faced an aggressive form of breast cancer for thirteen years. For much of her final decade, she underwent chemotherapy. I watched the woman who had spent her career caring for patients become a patient herself. Cancer never erased Carol.
She remained the woman I knew. Caring. Strong. Funny. Thoughtful. She remained my partner and my closest friend.
When she died at home in June 2015, I wrote her obituary myself. There was one thing I knew without hesitation: Carol was “the love of my life and my very very best friend.”
When people talk about lifelong love, it can sound almost impossible. Perhaps that is because we imagine love has to feel exactly the same for fifty years.
It doesn’t.
The teenage excitement changes. Life gets busier. Bodies age. Responsibilities become heavier. There are wonderful years and frightening ones.
But beneath all those changes, two people can keep choosing each other.
Carol and I started as two teenagers who barely knew how to hold hands. We became husband and wife, parents, grandparents, caregivers, companions, and old friends.
More than fifty years passed between that first hayride and our final days together.
A lot changed.
My love for Carol didn’t.
Get a glimpse into that love here.