VALENTINE’S SECRETS
Tips for the love of a lifetime
Three different couples, three very different stories but one happy thing in common: they’ve made love last for decades. They talk out troubles or praise the good (and ignore the annoying). They share a deep religious faith or a passion for the arts. They’ve endured long separations, grave illness or the death of a child. Yet they look at each other with palpable affection — and sometimes tears — in their eyes.
For Valentine’s Day, on behalf of everyone who’s newly in love (or wants to be), we ask them how they met, what made them realize that they’d found The One and the secret to making love last. How did you meet?
Both from small Québec communities and on the rebound from other relationships, they met through a friend at a Montréal bar 47 years ago this March.
How did you know they were The One?
Their relationship grew gradually, but Laurentin recalls a musical moment soon after they met.
“The first thing that I remember, very very close to the beginning, is when we heard with exactly the same delight one of the Bachiana Brasileiras of (composer Heitor) Villa-Lobos, Number 5 I think, the one with tons of cellos and the solo soprano,” he said. “We started talking about opera. Music was a very important factor. And I was an architect and he’s a painter so that brought us very, very close immediately.”
“If you want a really romantic thing, when we celebrated our 45th year together it just turned out to be on a day when somebody we know was having a private concert,” René said. “She had a soprano come in and at the end of the concert, Laurentin asked that this soprano sing it — I was in tears.”
His eyes grew misty again at the memory.
What is the secret to long-lasting love?
This is a couple that finds togetherness by having a room of one’s own. Downstairs, their duplex is full of René’s own majestic landscape paintings and art collection. Upstairs, Laurentin’s space is spare — he gave away his furniture to Syrian refugees and never got more.
“It was very important when we bought the house to have a duplex so that each of us could have his own space,” René said. “Still, if I go upstairs, which is Laurentin’s space, I will knock on the door before I go in because that’s a space that I have to respect.”
“It was difficult at the beginning, while you’re starting your relationship that’s growing like a flower ... and you’re told ‘your space and my space,’ ” Laurentin remembered. “He was right. It’s a psychological space as well. We need our breathing space.”
But if one shows up at the grocery store alone, the clerk will invariably inquire after the other.
And every evening, the couple cook a late dinner together in their cosy shared kitchen and plan the next day — Laurentin is involved in three choirs and is staging a new opera, Rene volunteers with the Ottawa Senior Pride Network and chairs the Bruce House board — then René starts a night of painting in his studio while Laurentin heads to bed.
“You have to make compromises,” René said of making love last. “You have to respect the other a lot. Probably the most important thing in any relationship is respect.” How did you meet?
The Hughes, who celebrated their 60th anniversary last October, met by pure accident when Lyndell, a Vancouver native who was teaching school in Hamilton, drove to the capital with a friend for the weekend to see the tulips. There, she was invited to dinner where Stanley was boarding and met the scientist 16 years her senior with the musical Welsh accent.
Stanley, who had just arrived in Canada — he’d become a world-renowned mycologist based at Agriculture Canada — recalls being a stranger and his pleasure at hitting it off with the warm young woman.
“Well! We just clicked that very night,” Lyndell recalled, sitting hand-in-hand with Stanley on the couch of their tidy Tudor house, a friendly cat at their feet. “Something said to me, ‘This guy is worth following through with.’
“I saw more than Ottawa that evening. It all began to unfold.”
How did you know they were The One?
A long courtship followed in which Stanley would drive his sports car — a black MG with red leather upholstery — to Hamilton for visits.
“Those are very nice cars, but they’re not good for cuddling,” Lyndell recalled.
“They’re very cold in winter,” Stanley conceded.
“All the more reason for cuddling!” his wife joked with a shiver.
The rest of the time, they wrote to one another faithfully and still have most of the yellowed letters and envelopes.
“Every day I wrote a letter to Stan,” Lyndell said. “I’d get letters back saying I was just waiting for Monday morning so your letter would be there.
“We were a couple of wide-eyed kids.”
They got married at Chalmers (now Dominion-Chalmers) United Church and in the black-andwhite photos, Stanley beams and Lyndell’s face glows above a waltz- dress of Chantilly lace.
“You can see the happiness,” Lyndell said. “We were and are happy.”
What is the secret to long-lasting love?
The couple says that fortune has smiled on them, but they have known pain, too. The parents of two “wonderful” surviving children, they leaned on one another after the 2011 death of their eldest son.
“Together, we weathered that,” Lyndell said.
That gratitude and their just plain affection for each other is obvious. Asked to give his wife a kiss for a photo, Stanley gives her a flurry.
The key to lasting love is to ignore the little things that “drive us crazy” and focus on praising the things that please you, Lyndell said.
“Patience and acceptance of different views and attitudes,” Stanley added. “Just that. Everything else is straightforward.” How did you meet?
“I saw him when I was 13 and thought: this is the boy I’m going to marry,” recalled the vivacious Claudette of their meeting at school in Saint John, N.B. She noticed his curly, blond hair in a then-fashionable ducktail and bright blue eyes. While Lee left school at 16 to join the military, the pair stayed in touch. They married at 19 and 20 in a church overlooking the Bay of Fundy and renewed their vows last year after 60 years of marriage at an annual mass at Notre Dame Cathedral Basilica.
How did you know they were The One?
“She’s more of an extrovert and I’m an introvert so it balances,” Lee, adding with a twinkle: “I like listening to her.”
But the couple’s enduring admiration for each other is clear.
Claudette praises Lee’s commitment to his faith — he converted to Catholicism after being taken to a Benediction by Claudette’s father, and after his retirement from the military was ordained a deacon, now serving at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church.
Both cite the diaconate process of four years of classes, which Claudette attended, too, as an exciting time of engaging with their faith together.
Lee says that his wife, a retired federal government clerk, is always doing something for others and cites her sacrifices as she cared for their four children while he was deployed on missions from Germany during the Berlin Crisis to Cyprus with the United Nations.
What is the secret to long-lasting love?
“We think it’s our faith life that’s made the difference,” Lee said. “When we got married, there was no doubt — it was a lifetime commitment, the sacrament of marriage. It didn’t mean everything went smooth, but you don’t walk away as soon as the going gets tough. I spent so much time away from home it’s incredible. Claudette brought up the kids, basically, because I was a year at a time overseas.”
When he came home, Claudette had saved family joy for him — think Christmas in September — and they were a united front, Lee said.
“The children, when one parent said no, they’d try out the other one,” he recalled. “I always said, ‘When you guys grow up and leave, mum and I are going to be the ones left. Don’t expect me to side against her — it’s our relationship that we have to maintain.’”
Claudette, meanwhile, would advise couples to talk out their troubles before they turn into resentment.
“You have to,” she said, “or it sits like a rotten potato on the counter.”
Amen to that.