I walked contentedly to my room nearby, slipped the magnetic card into the slot, and ambled inside to wind down for my nightly bedtime routine. I unloaded the small pile of stuff I was carrying on top of a dresser, clicked a couple bedside lamps on for ambience, and pulled my pajamas out of a drawer. (I’m the kind of gal who actually arranges her suitcase contents in the hotel’s furniture—makes things feel temporarily like a home.)
I only had one more small piece of business to take care of—call Pat. It was closing on eight o’clock at night. I had a small window before it would be too late for this older couple Dot said I had to meet while I was in South Africa.
Pat and Henry are Dot’s aunt and uncle. She said I needed to meet them because they were the couple she’s always looked up to. They had a fun lease on life and deep love and commitment toward each other even after forty-seven years. Though Pat wasn’t officially a part of the club, I considered her an honorary member based solely on Dot’s credibility and recommendation. When Dot told me her aunt and uncle were her inspiration to believe in the possibility of a lifelong love even after experiencing the pain of infidelity and divorce from a previous relationship, I really had no idea just how much they would also impact my life.
I sat on a small chair next to the window, grabbed the phone, and dialed the number.
I bet they’re asleep. I hope I’m not waking them, I thought. But suddenly, a sweet, small voice blurted, “This is Pat.”
I could feel her spunkiness jumping out of the phone. I felt as though I had just rung a college grad for a phone interview.
“Hi, Pat. This is Fawn Weaver. Did Dot tell you I’d be calling?”
“Oh, yes, but she didn’t say when.”
She inquired about my schedule while in Cape Town. When I shared it with her, she said, “Well, it sounds like your schedule is quite tight, so how about we meet tonight?”
Her response caught me off guard. I was calling her at a quarter to eight, and I’d never heard of a couple that age having that much energy at the end of the day.
“Sure, I’d love to meet tonight, if you’re up to it.”
“Lovie!” Pat shouted as she pulled the phone away from her mouth, “Fawn just had dessert and tea with Dot and Ken, and is at the hotel. Should we go there now and meet her for some more tea?
“Henry said we’ll come now,” she said, addressing me again. “We’ll be there at 8:15. I am wearing a maroon-colored outfit—no mauve—and Henry is in a blue sweater.” I agreed to meet them downstairs at 8:15 p.m.
So much for winding down.
We said our good-byes, and I walked to the bathroom to get brushed up for this last bit of my day.
When I entered the lobby, there was no mistaking Pat. She had a maroon scarf wrapped around her hair like a headband, with a long tail draped across her left shoulder, pulling her thick, gray hair out of her face. She wore hoop earrings and an outfit I’d expect to find in my or my girlfriend’s closet, not donned by a woman close to my father’s age.
“Pat?” I said tentatively. With that she headed over to me as quickly as possible and gave me a huge hug.
“Hello, Fawn!” She introduced Henry, and we began walking toward the restaurant just off the lobby.
“Pat, Dot told me you could match my energy, but she didn’t tell me you weren’t going to look even close to seventy.”
“I married an old man!” she shot back. “I’m not seventy. He’s seventy-two. I’m only sixty-seven.” Henry belted out a laugh and tried to hand Pat an imaginary cane as we walked.
By the time we sat down, I was still trying to wrap my head around this couple. Either they had a time machine, or they had found the fountain of youth. I live fewer than forty-five minutes from Beverly Hills, home to some of the greatest plastic surgeons in the world. I know what it looks like to be altered and to be altered well. Henry’s and Pat’s youthfulness did not come from a surgeon’s knife.
“I’ve decided to scrap the original interview about love and marriage and to instead interview you about how to stay young forever,” I said, only slightly joking.
It took less than five minutes to fall in love with this couple.
Pat and Henry pressed me to go with a local drink I’d never heard of. They assured me it was one of the best drinks in all of South Africa. And how right they were. Red cappuccino, or what is sometimes called rooibos cappuccino, became my absolute obsession in Cape Town starting with my first sip.
The drink is prepared in the exact same manner as a regular cappuccino, but these savvy South Africans have figured out a way to swap out the espresso beans for a naturally decaffeinated red tea grown only in their country.
The red cappuccino was euphorically good, and I almost forgot why I was sitting in that hotel restaurant. But I was in great company. Pat and Henry kept me captivated and laughing for hours. After twenty minutes of chatting about them just getting their pilot’s licenses, the plane they were building together from a kit, her desire to learn to play the keyboard, walking first thing every morning, and eating a lot of veggies and fish and staying away from red meat (her, not Henry, who proudly proclaimed he ate red meat as much as possible, and Pat didn’t know what she was missing), after all this, the conversation shifted to why I’d come to South Africa.
“We have a lot of fun,” Henry began after my inquiry regarding their energy and youth. “And the thing is, we don’t have to do anything to be happy. Our own company is plenty for us. We’re great friends, so even if we don’t go out around the town, it’s enough for us.” He then shared all the beautiful things there are to do in Cape Town between enjoying all the wineries, walking along the beaches, eating at the endless number of restaurants. “But we can do a lot of nothing too. We can actually sit in each other’s company all day long and not be bored,” he told me.
They are friends. From the moment they sat down to dinner together, it was evident. They joked, played, and laughed at each other’s expense, all while remaining completely respectful of each other. Pat calls Henry “Lovie.” And throughout our time of tea and dessert together, they looked into each other’s eyes, made each other smile more times than I can count, and held hands as if today could be their last.
I wondered, out loud, if they’d always been this way. If from the moment they were married, they determined they would remain great friends and in love throughout their lifetime. The answer was yes.
“I remember a friend,” Pat recounted, “who told me one day I was going to have to wake up from this bubble I was in and live in the real world.” I knew exactly what her friend meant, because I’ve heard similar things throughout my marriage.
I asked if they had other couples similar to them, people they could hang out with who were fun, enjoyable, and adored each other as much as they did.
“We have chosen our friends very carefully. We have a lot of friends, but the ones we socialize with, go out with most often, we don’t have many of those because we might irritate them,” Henry responded. “We have only a core group of friends we choose to be around, because they complement us and we think we complement them. Others are destructive to our relationship.”
Henry and Pat are highly selective of who they associate with on a regular basis. They’ve intentionally kept people close to them who are like-minded: specifically, those who put their marriages and families first. Those who, as Henry put it, are not destructive. They will not sit in the company of a couple who are not respectful of each other (at least not more than once).
Pat recalled years ago sitting in disappointment and frustration with “various crowds of ladies” as each wife attempted to “outdo the next” in speaking poorly of her husband. “It’s infectious,” she told me. “You can get caught up in the self-pity party or blaming party, and in fact it just kills everything.” Pat said she won’t join in those sorts of conversations and cannot stand to be around them.
I know exactly how she feels. When Keith and I were first married, we attended a “life group” through our church with several other couples. A few of them had tenuous relationships or were going through a rough patch, and they spent the entire time talking about that. Keith and I usually held hands sitting on the couch, or I’d tuck my head beneath his shoulder. We didn’t do it for show or anything. It’s just what we did at home, on our own couch. It would have felt unnatural to stop just because other people were around.
Within a few weeks of attending this life group together, I noticed that when Keith and I got in the car after meeting with the group, I’d get snippy with him. It’s almost as if I was subconsciously trying to pick a fight. At no other time in our relationship did this happen; only after life group. After several weeks of doing this, I became self-aware and realized I was trying to create conflict where none existed so we could “fit in” better, to manufacture conflict just to seem more authentic as a couple.
As silly as that seems when I think about it now, it happens all the time. Couples who love and adore each other, and have nothing negative to say about each other, soon begin looking for things wrong in their relationship. Small, insignificant things, that would otherwise not matter in the least. But because so many of their friends are complaining about their spouses, these once-happy couples look for negative things to say about their spouses too. Sitting there listening to Pat, I inwardly wondered how many women have unknowingly created a downward shift in their marriages in order to fit in with the “woe is me” of their girlfriends?
When I posted an article on the blog at the club, challenging women to be the one voice in the room changing those negative conversations into positive ones, the response was overwhelming. It touched a nerve, and in a good way. When their girlfriends begin having a “blaming party,” as Pat called it, these women would refuse to join in and would instead work to turn the conversation away from that negativity. Pat has done this throughout her entire marriage. She has refused to be around women who speak negatively of their husbands. And by doing so, she’s been able to spend her entire marriage focusing on what Henry does right rather than the minor things he does wrong.
Like nearly every couple I’ve met who have remained great friends over the years, Pat and Henry made a conscious choice not to sweat the small stuff. And it’s all small. Henry told me that he and Pat had decided long ago that tomorrow is never promised, so they would never carry a disagreement into the night. It simply wasn’t that important.
Those who bring disagreements to bed, they told me, make an unwise and presumptive decision. Going to bed angry with your spouse assumes you will wake up the next day to continue in the disagreement. But what a tragedy it would be, they both pointed out, if your spouse didn’t wake up the next morning. The memory you’d live with for the remainder of your life is not the great times you had together, but rather the last thing you did or said, a regret that would likely stay with you until the day you pass away.
It was hard to believe I had just met Pat and Henry a few short hours earlier, and yet they were divulging so much. But telling people you’re trying to learn the secrets of a great marriage is like getting a free pass to their most personal lives. Even so early in my journey, I learned that people who have pioneered a path toward happy marriages are so eager to share it. It’s as if they don’t want their good learnings to go to waste. I was lucky enough to be the stranger who asked them for their insight.
The evening wore on, and the restaurant was closing up. A young, college-aged woman was so kind to work on her closing duties instead of hurrying us out the door. Even so, she was giving us quick glances as chairs were upturned on their tables. I guess floor cleaning was next.
Though Pat, Henry, and I probably could have talked long into the night, we silently and unanimously took our cues. Last crumbs were dabbed off of plates with fingers, and room-temperature sips were slurped from teacups.
This time, I really was going to bed.
“You better get your rest,” Pat said as we headed out to the lobby and I walked them to the front door. “You’re going to need it!”
Before the night was over, we had made a date to take a walk together the next morning. I was heading to Mauritius soon, and all the time I’d spent on planes made me eager to work my legs out a bit. Emphasis on “a bit.” But what I got with Pat the next morning was anything but. The energy she exuded while sitting in a chair only multiplied when she power walked.
We started on the boardwalk along the beach at eight in the morning. It was quiet and restorative as the waves lapped the rocks below and delivered a refreshing sound. We did this for about a mile when things got interesting. Pat took a turn to the left and initiated our ascent into the neighborhoods flanking the beaches. I was a bit nervous because the homes were more like compounds with cinder block barricades topped with barbed wire. And there we were, a white woman in her late sixties and a black woman in her thirties, hoofing it up the hill. It took considerable effort to keep step with Pat.
We walked for hours, starting from Clifton Beach to Lion’s Head and eventually to Camps Bay, where I’d spent time with Dot and Ken. As we started to rise, I could see the expanse of Clifton Beach where the mountains majestically surged into the blue water. As a girl who lives close to the Pacific, I never grow tired of the ocean. But there was something special about the setting of this beach. Or maybe it was just me being lifted out of my normal context to see it with new eyes.
As Pat marched up the slopes of Lion’s Head, our conversation became more sporadic. I was just focusing on my next step as we passed through paths lined with silver trees and perennial wildflowers. Every once in a while, a bird would flutter across the path and dip into the underbrush or head out into the open air as if it were going to cross the ocean.
After about an hour of climbing, we both took a breather to enjoy the panorama splayed out before us. A sea of homes below us, nestled into the hills of Cape Town, stopped just shy of the sandy beaches.
The path along Lion’s Head took us close to Table Mountain. There was a cable car to take you to the summit, a two-mile wide plateau as flat as a Kansas plain. I half expected Pat to suggest that we summit the old-fashioned way. But I was really starting to feel tired. Thankfully we had just a short ways to go before reaching Camps Bay, where Henry would meet us for lunch.
Lunch. There was never a more beautiful word to me in that moment.
It’s a good thing, I thought to myself, that I have a flight to Mauritius to rest.