I Need To Add This

Last night when I was in bed and wide awake, I started thinking about relationships. I guess because the end of the year 2016 was getting closer and that was the date when I thought my stepmother would have found a new man. My father died in March 2016 and I predicted my step-mother would have a new man before the end of the year. This may sound uncaring, but she phoned my father a few months after my mother died and told him she understood what he was going through because her husband had just died. That was in October or November and by June they were married. My father told me he was very lonely and she seemed like a nice woman. I think she's the kind of woman who needs a man around.

They were married for thirty years. My father was friends with her first husband when they were teenagers. He never knew her. That's one relationship.

My mother and father met when they were teenagers. She married my father's best friend when she was 19 and he was 17. After her first husband joined the Army Air Force, at 17, my father and his other friends kept stopping by her apartment to talk and find out how their friend was doing. I'm sure they missed him because he was the group leader and always found exciting things to do. After the others graduated from high school and moved on, my father and a friend who was also dating my mother's sister, still kept in touch with her. When my father joined the Army Air Force himself, my mother wrote him letters, and they continued to stay friends even after her first husband and my father's friend was killed during WWII. She was a young working mother with two kids by that time. After a few years she and my father were married. They were together until she died in 1985.

They met when my mother was probably 15 or 16 and my father was two years younger. They were friends, then lovers for 50 years. If my mother had lived as long as my father did,and they had stayed together (which I'm sure they would have), the number of years would have been 81. That's another relationship.

I started thinking about the length of time couples stay together,  and then started adding up in my head the number of years my parents were together. The number seemed fantastic to me. My husband and I have known each other for 49 years, and we didn't meet until college.

That is a long time. That's another relationship.

Then there are my aunts, uncles, and grandparents almost all of whom had long relationships. The same with my husband's family. It is amazing to me.

Those are other relationships.

I started wondering if our families have set some kind of record for long-lasting relationships. Probably not. It was just the times in which they lived, and the kind of people they were.