Wedded Bliss...

"...We've been too busy to fight..."

A Scottboro couple recently celebrated their 80th wedding anniversary, one of the longest marriages among living people when compared to reports in the 2007 Guinness Book of World Records.


Alonzo, 97, and Beulah Sims, 94, celebrated their anniversary a day early Sunday at the nursing home where they have lived since May 2002.Without their families' approval, the two teens married in 1927, when he was working at a farm, plowing fields with a mule and picking cotton for 50 cents a day. The couple, who raised six children, credit their long lives to hard farm work and eating lots of vegetables. They moved frequently to find farm work, going from Paint Rock Valley near Garth to Atchley Bottom in Madison County and then to Woodville in the 1960s. They said their eight decades of marriage have been virtually free of fussing.''We've been too busy to fight,'' Beulah Sims said.

In a society where most marriages do not last it is quite inspiring to read about this elderly couple who have made their relationship last. I must admit reading this brief story of their lives together it does not strike me as a recipe for wedded bliss..but its hard to argue the experience of 80 years ! This is one that defies odds and predictions! They married young, had no family approval, worked at unskilled jobs had way too many kids for our society's taste and frecuently moved, all markers of risk of dissolution in a marriage. Yet these two, amidst the busyness of hard work, raising children and making ends managed to remain together and after 80 years report enjoying each other's company.

Maybe the marriage experts are missing something! It seems that money, family support, marrying when older and more sucessful, limiting the number of children and having more quality time are not necesarily conducive to longterm sucess in marriage! Certainly not for most of us AND..according to these two real experts....maybe we all have too much time in our hands!

seraph