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8 Family Values Enduring Love Let this story end as it began, bridging “Young Love” to “Enduring Love.” Why is it that “the fiery passions of youth rarely ignite the glowing embers of enduring love”? What can young lovers learn from Pat’s story and my story and our story together? A successful, enduring marriage is most natural when both husband and wife begin their marriage feeling genuinely blessed by their good fortune in finding each other. If marriage is clouded by reservations, if it is tentative and exploratory, it will probably fail when tough times arrive, as they always do. A marriage that begins as a trial, to see how it works, will not have the strength to endure the pressures that will surely test that union. However passionately desirous of each other two young people may be, the consummation of that eager love can never be enough of a foundation on which to build an enduring marriage. Something more is needed. But young people in love are generally not capable of the depth of feelings that come with maturity. How can they test their capacity for enduring love at a time in their lives when they cannot really know what that concept means? The answer is simple: They must believe. They must believe to the depths of their souls that they will learn together through the decades of marriage whatever they need to know to make it work. They must have faith in themselves, faith in each other, and faith in the very concept of marriage as a lifelong union of two people forever in love. Beyond passion and faith, they need to be tough-minded and resilient . The bonds of young love are incredibly strong, but too often they are easily fractured. An engineer would describe these bonds as strong but not tough. 156 chapter eight My wife and I are both very tough, resilient people.As we both have demonstrated throughout our lives, we each can take a hit and keep moving forward; we can get knocked down and get up again as many times as life’s fortunes demand. Our marriage has been subjected to the usual pressures of family life and perhaps a bit more, with six kids pulling us at times in different directions and sometimes down. My commitment to my job responsibilities created inevitable stresses: “What comes first, your family or your job?” But Pat and I always knew that somehow we would solve our problems together, and never apart. Confronting crises together made us stronger as individuals and as a team. So the journey from young love to a fiftieth wedding anniversary requires both faith and tough-minded resilience, as well as the passion that brings two people together. What else is needed? To be fair to all the people I love whose marriages have failed or who had to marry twice to find the right partner, I must acknowledge that the first thing needed for an enduring marriage is dumb luck in falling in love with the person who is right for you in the long run. When I crossed the dance floor in 1950 to meet Pat Jolley, I was not drawn to her by the quality of her character. It is sheer good luck that the girl I was attracted to then had the potential to become the woman I am in love with now, almost sixty years later. So good luck is necessary, but it is far from sufficient. Much more is needed. For true love to endure, the passion must never be lost. The expressions of love take changing forms, but the excitement of being together should last a lifetime. A good marriage is founded on enduring love, but it becomes much more than that. Pat and I have always been best friends, sharing basic values and common foundations.We enjoy being together.We have become so interdependent that it is hard to imagine one without the other. As noted in the preface, that possibility was tested when on April 12, 2006, I experienced a life-threatening injury. One hundred days after the routine placement in my chest of a pacemaker designed to establish a floor level on my heartbeat, which had always been slow, I passed out in my office at the University of Arizona and was immediately rushed to the nearby University Medical Center. Both pulse and diastolic blood pressure were undetectable for no reason that was apparent to the head of emergency medicine...

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