If their faces didn’t look so much alike, I would never have believed Bonnie and Faye are sisters.
Faye is a blonde-haired gal, and her clothes and personality are youthful. Faye loves hanging out with her kids. She and her teenage daughter, Emily, are best friends.
Bonnie’s hair is brown, with deep hues of red; she has a far more subdued look and attitude. “Faye thinks I’m old-fashioned,” Bonnie told me. Unlike her sister, even when Bonnie was seventeen, her best friend was in her early thirties. She worked from the time she was fifteen, so no one found it odd that she married a man so much older than her.
As many mistakes as Faye made in her marriage, Bonnie has done the opposite. “They have a perfect marriage,” Faye told me. “The best I’ve ever seen. If you ask anyone in our community, family, or church who has the happiest marriage around, they’d all say Bonnie.”
When I shared this with Bonnie, she just smiled and said she has an answer for why they’d all say that: “Jerry. They’d all say the reason I have such a great marriage is because of Jerry.”
Jerry, a golden-hearted, gray-haired man seventeen years older than Bonnie, is every bit what people claim. He is gentle with Bonnie, considerate, respectful, and every bit as much in love with her today as he says he was when they married more than thirty years ago. Jerry absolutely adores Bonnie and doesn’t care who knows it, and Bonnie reciprocates that feeling every opportunity she gets.
When telling me about her sister, Faye sent me a screen shot of a message Bonnie had posted on her Facebook page. It was a note to Jerry. “Best Hubby ever!” it began. “Today is the 32nd anniversary of our first kiss. You remember EVERY year by giving me a small gift. Your kiss—your kiss is on my list—of the best things in life! (sorry if too sappy for you FB friends ☺).”
Bonnie and Jerry came to meet me at my hotel, where we found a quiet little corner to enjoy some beverages and talk. I turned on my digital audio recorder, and we began our chat. I shared with them the reason I had begun the Happy Wives Club, and the disappointment I’d felt when hearing all the negative comments about marriage. Bonnie could immediately relate.
“I went into marriage expecting it to be horrible because that’s what everyone tells you,” she began. “You know, once people say, ‘I do,’ then they don’t. The first five years of my marriage, I was waiting for it to crumble. Then one day I thought, ‘I think they just all have bad marriages.’
“Couples are always talking about how much they have to work,” Bonnie continued. “Maybe that’s the problem. They’re working too hard.”
Her comment reminded me of a quote I’ve often heard, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” I feel like this when I’m writing. For many, writing can be tedious, frustrating, and make you want to pull your hair out and throw away every pen in your house. For me, it’s cathartic, it’s refreshing, it’s fun. It doesn’t feel like work. Even if I’m writing for twelve hours straight or under deadline to turn in a section of a book to my publisher. Because they pay me to write, I guess it’s technically a job, but it feels more like an honor and a privilege.
Bonnie and Jerry were once asked to lead a couples workshop through their church, and they went to a class to learn how to lead the group. There they were taught the things they’d need to teach class attendees. “And I’m thinking,” Bonnie said, recalling the experience, “ ‘We don’t fit, because we don’t have to work at it, so how do you tell people you have to work at it?’ ” I then asked if, after thirty years of marriage, they ever felt as though they’d had to “work” at it, and without hesitation she said no. “We’ve been told over and over, ‘It’s work, it’s work, it’s work.’ So maybe the ‘work’ is in getting a marriage not to feel like work.”
I agree with Bonnie. I’ve never felt like my marriage was “work.” It takes effort, it takes patience, it takes diligence and humility, but it doesn’t feel like work. Is that wrong to say?
Jerry, who had remained pretty quiet throughout this exchange, suddenly chimed in for the first time. “If there’s any work involved,” he said, “it’s so minor you don’t realize it’s work. Then it’s not work.”
Jerry’s attitude toward marriage astounds Bonnie (and me too). He believes if he’s going to spend his life married to her, then making her happy is a part of his purpose on earth. And he believes he’s achieved that, so it feels good. “Because the stress is off you in a way,” he concluded. Fulfilling one of his life’s purposes, being a great husband, allows him to feel content inside, and not insecure, he told me.
Early on in our time together, I noticed a glaring difference in their personalities. I asked Jerry about it. “She’s as outgoing as blazes,” he responded. I asked if those differences had created much conflict. They both assured me it’s all been pretty minor.
“When we were first married,” Bonnie told me, “there was an old man in our church who I called Grandpa. The first thing he taught me was, ‘If you want a successful marriage, only pick on things that really matter.’ ” Grandpa told her that if something annoyed her (and he assured her there would be plenty of things), he would counsel her not to raise her voice until things really mattered. “Then you’ll be taken seriously.” Initially, there were a bunch of small annoyances, but she’d tell herself to “shut up unless it matters.” And she thinks that helped them greatly their first bit of time together.
“The other thing is,” Bonnie went on, “I was raised in a house with five girls, and we all fought, yelled, screamed, and pulled each other’s hair just to be heard.” So she had to learn a different way to communicate.
Bonnie soon recognized that she has a dominant personality, and it would be easy to assert herself and step on Jerry all the time. But she chose to give him the final word. She’ll disagree, she admitted, and say her piece, but in the end, he gets the final word. My face lit up when she said this because it reminds me of one of my favorite books on marriage, The Surrendered Wife.1
The author of Surrendered Wife, Laura Doyle, is a feminist who learned the hard way that feminism in the workplace may be a good thing, but bringing that attitude home is a recipe for disaster. Men and women are wired differently, and when two cars come to an intersection, one must yield or both will crash. Any friend I have who tells me about challenges she’s having with her husband, I buy her this book. I’ve even given it as a wedding gift.
I can’t completely explain the phenomenon, nor will I attempt to try, but something magical happens when women read The Surrendered Wife. For starters, the author prescribes that a woman not tell her husband she’s reading the book. And yet somehow, each woman to whom I’ve given the book testifies that after she read it she found her husband had changed for the better. The high value of giving up control and relying on our God-given gift of influence—something women have in abundance, especially in comparison to most of our male counterparts—is one of the most insightful lessons in the book. Striving to remain vulnerable and admitting when you’re hurt is such a simple thing in concept, but Doyle does a great job in reminding us why so many strong women fail to do it. With the slight tweaks and adjustments the author suggests based on her own bumpy road to happily ever after, every girlfriend to whom I’ve given the book has said her marriage immediately turned the corner . . . for the better.
With such a large age difference, I was surprised to learn that Bonnie and Jerry hadn’t experienced greater challenges, especially in the area of communication. But they had decided from the very beginning to subtract divorce from their marital equation. “Things like, ‘If things don’t work, I’m outta here,’ isn’t even a part of the conversation,” said Bonnie, “because we made a commitment before God, and it’s for life. So I tease Jerry, ‘We’re in this ’til death do us part, so if you tick me off, I only have one choice.’ ”
Jerry and Bonnie have always supported each other. As a postal service worker for thirty-five years, Jerry first supported Bonnie through five years of college, followed by five years of accounting studies and three more years of bankruptcy trust program studies. They both worked full-time, but her schooling was a family thing. She’d help with chores around the house, and he’d help her study. He’d even read textbooks to her when she was cooking. “I’d read them in a monotone voice because they were so boring,” he admitted.
Now, his support for her is paying off big-time because he was able to retire early, thirteen years ago—the same amount of time he had invested throughout her studies. Bonnie was ready to repay the support she’d received from him. Not a bad tradeoff, eh? (Canadians say “eh” a lot, so I’ve been waiting for a place to say it.)
I continued my inquiries about disagreements, because I find it so fascinating that with such an age difference between them, they’ve had so few. I wondered out loud if that was because they don’t verbally attack each other.
“Never make insults,” Bonnie quickly chimed in.
“That would be deadly,” Jerry added. “It’s not made personal by calling names or insulting,” he told me, before pausing and concluding. “Boy, that’s a good one.”
“We disagree fairly,” Bonnie shared. “We don’t fight dirty. Like I hear people call each other names and I think, ‘Oooh, you can’t take that back. It’ll be stuck in their brain forever.’ ” She also told me they don’t even like to disagree. “There is a bond between us, so if there’s something that breaks that bond, we don’t feel right,” she said. “So we have to work to get it back together because we can’t stand it.” (Ah, there’s that word work again.)
Any disagreements usually last an hour, Jerry told me. “And then we’re back.”
When I asked if they could remember ever allowing a disagreement to fester overnight, Jerry swore he remembered it happening once, but couldn’t recall when or what it was over. Bonnie didn’t remember the incident at all. “There’s one disagreement we’ve never resolved,” she told me. “I want a dog.”
Cue the music. I think I just stepped into an ongoing disagreement.
“I’ll be the one cleaning up after it, and I can’t stand that,” Jerry said. “They run around with their hindquarters, and you’re walking in that.” This discussion fired Jerry up and made Bonnie chuckle. (Just his use of the word hindquarters made me laugh out loud. I almost think she brought it up just so I could see what their disagreements look like.)
Jerry ran through his argument, and I could tell it wasn’t the first time—he seemed so practiced at it, as if reading off a marriage teleprompter or something. His main line of reasoning was all about smells and dignity. Jerry held his line at the impossibility of erasing the smell of pet urine. Enough said.
Bonnie and Jerry told me they never run away from disagreements. They face each one head-on. “By holding it in, you’ll begin to slowly form a negative opinion of each other,” Bonnie reasoned, “which means you can’t work out what the disagreement is.”
Bonnie is always the first to want to talk about things, and many years ago Jerry had to learn to accept that. But he wasn’t always ready to talk about the issue the moment it arose, so he adopted a simple phrase: “I’m not ready yet.” So Bonnie would wait an hour or so, and then return. “Are you ready to talk about it yet?” If it were up to Jerry, he probably would have avoided the tough conversations altogether, but he knew she wouldn’t forget, so they would just deal with it. This respectful negotiation is one of the best decisions they made early on in their marriage, they said.
Another thing Bonnie shared is that there’s nothing she has that’s a secret from Jerry, and other than fibbing about Christmas presents he’s purchased for her (something he says they agreed to years ago), they both hold to the cliché “honesty is the best policy.”
Early in their marriage, whenever Jerry was being a bit grumpy, Bonnie would ask, “Are you in a grouchy mood?” He’d immediately rebuff her accusation and say, “I’m not in a grouchy mood; you’re in a grouchy mood.” So she learned to adjust her question. She started asking instead, “Honey, am I in a grouchy mood?” When he’d respond that she didn’t seem to be, she’d then point out that if she wasn’t the one in a grouchy mood, it must be him.
Jerry flashed me a “she’s got me” kind of look across the table.
Before ending our time together, Bonnie and Jerry invited me to church the following day. They warned me in advance that it would be boring because their pastor was out of town, and the minister coming to preach was quite dull—something I can vouch for as being 100 percent accurate. Afterward we all went to eat lunch.
And that’s when I met Faye’s incredibly handsome husband, Edward, for the first time.
As I watched him and Jerry at the table, something became abundantly clear. Other than my absolute respect and admiration for the fact that they both ordered their dessert, a decadent ice cream mud pie, as an appetizer, they are just great people. Happy wives have wonderful husbands. Creating a happy marriage begins with choosing the right spouse, and both of these sisters had chosen the cream of the crop.
During lunch, I kept thinking back to the woman who had washed my hair. If meetings and lunches like this could eventually help someone in her situation, this would all be worth it. I also kept thinking about Keith. Like Bonnie and Faye, I have a wonderful husband, and that gives me great hope and courage to lean into any challenges that may come our way.