To this day, Barb doesn’t remember when Doug proposed to her the first time. And Doug doesn’t recall her telling him no. Doug was in the US military and stationed in Vietnam. On a few days leave, he and other servicemen went to Australia to have a good time. That’s where he met Barb.
Barb and her friends were enjoying a girls’ night out, and the furthest thing from her mind was marriage. The women were hanging out at a bar, and she was not looking for her future spouse. But as fate would have it, Doug came strolling through the bar, and as they say, the rest was history. They were instantly attracted to each other—he a rough-and-tumble American serviceman, and she a stunning Australian with a brilliant accent. For two full days, they squeezed in as much time together as possible, lunches out, dinners together, and the intertwining of their souls. They barely remember leaving each other’s side. Soon though, it was time for Doug to return to Vietnam. “I’ll be back,” he promised her. Yeah, sure, Barb remembered thinking. Doug admitted, “I thought that too.” But their nervous, young hearts would dictate a story of love rushing in and thoughts flooding each other’s mind long after their hands unlocked and Doug boarded an aircraft, Vietnam-bound.
Not long after leaving, he decided he’d return to Australia to see Barb. Being away from those beautiful blue eyes proved more difficult than he could have ever anticipated. Two months later, he kept his promise. They spent a week dating, and before he left, he realized she was “the one.” Doug wasn’t looking to get married, and couldn’t wait to return to the United States, but he found himself on foreign land, having fallen head over heels with a woman he wanted to bring back home and make his wife.
“I did what men do in these sorts of situations. I asked her to marry me.” (I assured him that is not what men usually do in those types of situations after spending fewer than eight days—spread over two months—with a person.) But Barb rebuffed his advance. “I’ve planned a trip around the world, and you’re not part of that.” She and several of her young nursing friends had plans to travel the world and do nursing work along the way. Her trip was scheduled to begin soon, and Barb wasn’t willing to cancel her plans for a man she’d only known for a short period of time.
“I’ll wait,” he assured her. And wait he did. For fourteen months, as she traveled the world and he continued to be stationed in Vietnam, they wrote each other regularly.
As fate would have it, Barb’s travels eventually brought her to Nebraska, where she worked at a hospital, caring for a judge. Doug’s time in Vietnam ended and he was stationed near Pensacola, Florida.
Continuing his pursuit, Doug drove eleven hundred miles to see Barb and reiterate his desire to marry her. Then she got the news. The United States was revoking her visa, and she was to return home within thirty days. She’d come to America on a tourist visa, but when she applied to extend her time, she was asked if she was working in the US, and she told the truth. US officials immediately moved to deport her.
Barb began planning her life without Doug. But he wasn’t ready to let her go. Every day, when she returned home, he’d propose again. When she told the judge about her dilemma, he offered a solution. “When I get out of the hospital, I’ll marry you guys.”
It was all too much pressure, she said, recalling those days. “I told him, every time I go home for lunch, my boyfriend is proposing to me. When I come to work, you want to marry us. It’s all too much. I’m outta here.”
Within the thirty prescribed days, Barb left the States and headed to Europe. She and some friends spent time there working as nurses while Doug began looking into ways to get her back into the United States. A fiancée visa was his solution. But she’d have to say yes.
“One day, I was waitressing in London; another I was thinking I should go to Africa with the Peace Corps, and another I was thinking about returning to America,” Barb told me. She couldn’t make up her mind. But Doug wasn’t taking no for an answer.
Finally, she relented and returned to America, and she and Doug were married immediately. The short time they’d spent together, and the letters they’d sent back and forth across the Atlantic, cemented their love for each other. Two years later, they migrated to Australia, and Doug never looked back.
As I observed them, it was clear their marriage had an abundance of love and friendship. I asked them for their secret.
“I’d like to hear your side,” Barb said to Doug, playfully. “I know my answer.”
“Well, I don’t know that I have a normal answer for that,” he told me.
“There’s nothing normal about you, Lovie,” Barb quipped in response.
“I was taught to follow the golden rule,” Doug began. “As long as you do the right things for others, things will work themselves out along the way.” This golden rule, he told me, extended first and foremost to his beautiful wife. “You have to like someone a lot to be married forty years.” And their friendship is what has carried them through these four decades. It’s why they can live in an RV with fewer than 150 square feet and not feel cramped or that they need time away from each other. They banter back and forth and tell jokes about each other, but it’s all in the name of love and in the spirit of fun, and there’s no mistaking that.
Doug spoke for almost ten minutes about what it takes to keep a marriage great after so many years. Friendship, laughter, respect, trust, listening to each other, and putting the other above yourself. “Now, after that very lengthy answer from Doug,” Barb teased, “I’d like to give my answer.” I listened intently, as her ALS (known among Australians as motor neuron’s disease) caused her to speak a bit slower and with less force than Doug.
You have to “nurture the relationship,” Barb said. When I asked her to expand upon that, she gave an example. As a young person returning to Australia, she had immediately landed a nursing job in a desirable community. Doug was having a more challenging time finding work there because he was an ex-military man without any formal training or education. He’d need to do manual labor, and the only place he could make the kind of living he desired was in a dusty mining town with little going on but mining. Barb’s mom had posed one question to her at the time, “How happy is Doug going to be, not working while you’re working?”
Barb thought about that question and decided to pass on the nursing job in the hills and move with Doug to the mining town. She knew she could get work as a nurse anywhere, but Doug would be more limited in what he could do and where. “It’s give and take,” she told me was the lesson she learned early on in their marriage. “Rather than just thinking about me, consider us.”
Barb’s mom was a very “liberated woman.” For her day and time, her profession—a political journalist—was unusual for a woman. But her mother always put her home and family first. She did her job well, excelled in all she did, and instilled that work ethic in both of her daughters, but she also insisted they keep their priorities straight. “Women can do whatever men can, but consider your partner’s position of happiness first,” she’d taught them.
Each woman is different, has different temperaments, dreams, and upbringing. But listening to Barb reminded me that it’s good for every woman to get her own bearings on her values and personal priorities in order to have a great marriage. Being an independent woman doesn’t mean you are a dismissive one, uncaring or unresponsive to the needs of others. I was learning from Barb that personal sacrifice for anyone, including your spouse, is a great display of strength and character. Not weakness. Just as she’d learned from her mother’s example, Barb inspected cultural expectations closely to see what worked for her and what didn’t. Whether what she did seemed “traditional” or “progressive” was no longer a meaningful distinction to make. The man doesn’t have to be the main breadwinner, she concluded, and the woman doesn’t have to be the homemaker. Both could work, and both could crease the bedsheets.
On this trip, I’ve had the most freeing truth reinforced time and again. Great marriages are made when husbands and wives don’t allow cultural expectations to dictate their life decisions or their day-to-day interactions. A one-of-a-kind value system is forged, blended from two people who honor, cherish, and respect each other and who are willing to make personal sacrifices, even of their dreams, choices, and drives, for the other.
Come to think of it, we probably have to do that anyway. Might as well be for someone you love and who will return the favor when it matters. But I digress . . .
Barb went on to talk about her own (unmarried) daughters and how she’s passed on a similar message of support. “I tell them, the one that’s for you is the one that supports you and you equally support each other.” Nurturing your marriage and supporting your spouse is critical, she told me. And a “sense of humor goes a long way.” To that, Doug agreed. “You don’t want to take yourself too seriously.” Considering that Doug had to propose multiple times before he got a yes, I’m sure he doesn’t take himself too seriously.
There’s a levity with this couple, but not a frivolity. They concern themselves with the things that matter in their marriage and life together. They don’t get set adrift by the expectations of others, nor do they get turned sideways by tougher moments with each other. It’s clear that what they have works.
I’m sure if Barb had known all this the first time Doug proposed, she would have said yes in a heartbeat.