"I Got You, Babe" Is Couple's Theme Across Continents

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Love is in the air these days. Many have offered thoughts about this powerful emotion. This week, several of our readers share their thoughts in a series of guest essays.]

by Jane Stahl

They said it wouldn’t last. Our marriage that is. That was 57 years ago. 

At the time, my mother threatened to disown me when she learned the lineage of the new boy who’d captured my heart. Simply put, he had a rough life—completely different than mine.

Mother was not alone in wondering about our compatibility; and, I admit, even I couldn’t easily explain the intensity of my feelings. I mean, all I really knew about him was from a friend who’d dated him. Her lame endorsement—and that he was “into” car racing held no attraction. That he spent much of high school in the nurse’s office recovering from late night orchard parties with friends wasn’t appealing. In fact, when seeing him exit said office one morning, I recall thinking that he was one boy I’d never date.

But a note he’d written in my yearbook the day after our high school graduation took me by surprise. He’d written, “To a real nice girl I wish I could have gotten to know better. It might have been fun.”

I was intrigued, then, when he approached me at a public pool party, and I was amused at his casual charm and by the amusing observations he shared of others at the party whom we both knew.

That encounter led to an invitation to dinner--for which he showed up several hours late. He’d overslept—recovering again from yet another orchard party. By the time he arrived, I’d settled into my initial opinion of him. But, the apology was sincere, and the invitation still on.

And so, I went. That evening led to several weeks of dating—drive-in movies and long “porch talks” until my family’s annual two-week summer vacation took me out of state.

When I returned, he’d vanished. I learned that he was to leave for the Air Force in mid-August. He had no more time for me; apparently there were many parties to attend with his friends before his departure, and I was not a “party girl.”

I was devastated.

But September came as did my arrival as a college freshman; my summer romance became a bittersweet memory. Yet, when his Air Force photo appeared in the local paper, I clipped it and, with a sigh, hung it on my dorm room bulletin board.

Then, one day in late October, in a cleaning frenzy, shrugging my shoulders at my pointless tribute to a lost romance, I took down his photo and stuffed it in my desk drawer before heading to class and picking up my mail.

Because the Universe has a sense of humor and perfect timing, in my mailbox that same morning was a letter. From my long-lost love. He’d broken his toe and had run through his list of people who wrote to him, so, on a whim, he wrote to me.

How his letter got to me will forever be a mystery. My last name and the name of the college were misspelled, and he didn’t know the town where the college was located. “Pennsylvania” was the address he wrote. Somehow, the postal gods found me and, as they say, the rest is history.

From that day, over the next 2 ½ years—with me at college and with him in service to the country, we relied on weekly phone calls or reel-to-reel recordings from wherever he was stationed and hundreds of letters to one another—pages and pages of pretty much nothing—to keep our love affair alive.

Our “destination wedding” in Hawaii occurred while he was on an R&R from a year-long tour in Viet Nam and as his suggested “add on” to my mother’s dream vacation, the last family vacation we would spend as a nuclear family.

Beyond our unlikely beginning, there are so many stories to tell from those early years. So many coincidences and so many challenges. The Universe has had a pile of work to do in managing our relationship throughout the years, and it’s probably true that keeping us apart through our engagement was key to getting us to the altar! As they say, had we known then what we know now….

But it’s probably also true that our stubbornness—in showing the world that they had it wrong about us from the beginning—has kept us from drifting apart…or worse. Like all couples, our lifelong challenges, created by our differences, have been real and intense.

Yet, here we are, 57 years later. And in a recent “porch talk,” we have shared with some surprise that somehow we both were apparently smart enough back then to know what we were signing up for and had made smart choices in one another

I must have known, for example, that the wisdom, determination, and resilience that he brought to the relationship from his first family’s challenges were invaluable given my “easy life” and inexperience. I needed what he knew from his childhood hardships.

And while I can’t speak for him, perhaps he knew that the stability and independent spirit I brought to our relationship made me a strong partner. He didn’t have to manage life alone.

Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You, Babe” is still “our song.” But it was singing along with Tom Jones’ “What’s New Pussycat?” at that pool party in 1965 that made us both laugh…and fall in love.

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