Words of Advice for an Enduring Marriage From Some Old Pros
Angeline Anzalone’s hand was trembling so badly as she walked down the aisle that “my flowers were shaking,” she recalls.
She was too nervous to look at Michael Bongiorno, waiting for her at the altar, to see if he noticed. If she had, she might have seen that he was trembling too. “Like a leaf,” he says.
They had been dating for more than three years by then, but they had known each other even longer. Their parents had been friends long before they were born. They knew each other, and their own feelings as well. They were sure. And they were terrified.
“I knew that when we got married it was forever,” he says.
“That was instilled in the generation we came from,” she says. “When you got married, you stayed married.”
Still, he says, “Nobody thinks they’re going to be married 50 years.”
That was Sunday, June 12, 1938. They were both 21 years old. Sunday--long since recovered from those nuptial jitters--Mr. and Mrs. Michael Bongiorno of San Clemente will celebrate their golden wedding anniversary.
June traditionally is the peak of the wedding season and therefore a time for wedding anniversaries as well. Each young couple goes into marriage with the same hopes and promises, but if current trends hold, “till death do us part” will become “until the divorce is final” for as many as half of them.
Family Life asked couples whose marriages have lasted 25 years or longer to tell us how they decided on each other and how they have managed to stay together while so many others have given up.
“You have to know who you’re marrying,” Michael says. “Know their traits, their habits. A lot of these young people today, it doesn’t seem like they know each other very much. And I’m not talking about going to bed; don’t get me wrong. Are they neat and clean? Sloppy and dirty? What kind of food do they eat? We knew ourselves.”
He and Angeline wouldn’t have dreamed of it, but for those reasons, Michael believes that living together before marriage isn’t such a bad idea. “Today, I think it’s right--our church doesn’t approve of it, of course, but I think maybe you should stay with them for six months or so to find out what they’re like. I think it makes sense.”
Both the Bongiornos say that long before they knew each other’s habits, something inside told them this was the real thing. And they both remember the moment it happened.
“It was at her cousin’s wedding. She stood up for the wedding,” Michael recalls. “I think I had taken her out before, but it was nothing serious. It was hot, and I asked if she wanted to take a walk outside. She said OK, and as we were walking along, talking, she said, ‘Oh, I think my strap broke on my shoe.’ So I knelt down and I picked up her foot, and I just knew, right then, that she was the one.”
“It wasn’t really broken,” Angeline says. “I just wanted to see what he’d do. I knew it then too, that this was it.”
But there was a catch. Angeline already had a boyfriend. “She was hard to get, but I pursued her, and finally I won out,” Michael says.
“Little by little, I forgot about the other guy,” she says. “And finally, I was still going out with the other guy, and Mike said, ‘If you want to see me, you have to do it on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.’ ”
“I wasn’t going to settle for Tuesday or Wednesday night,” Michael says.
They were in his car one night after going out to dinner a few months later when Michael pulled out a diamond ring--”a little diamond,” he says. “My gosh, in ‘38, things were rough. You just barely got by.” They were both working for a tobacco company then, making about 40 cents an hour.
The expectation that their marriage would last helped make it so, the Bongiornos say. But if there had been serious, insoluble difficulties, Michael believes they “wouldn’t have hesitated at all to separate.”
Over the past half a century, they’ve had their share of arguments. “Oh, sure, we yell at each other like everybody else,” Michael says. “But we’ve never hit one another. We just holler hard.”
“We’ve had our spats and all that, but after a few hours, we just forgot about it,” Angeline says. “That’s the trouble with modern marriages. They jump in, something comes up and they don’t settle it, and then they jump out.”
Fred and Dorothy Pilone, both 71, of Los Alamitos don’t have quite as much experience at marriage--they’ll only be celebrating their 47th anniversary June 28. But if Dorothy’s life had turned out the way she had it planned at one point, she might be celebrating that anniversary with another man.
She met Fred at a party “a thousand years ago.” He was fun to be around, had a great sense of humor, but “I was more or less engaged to someone else. We hadn’t announced it, but we’d talked about it.”
So when Fred asked her to marry him, Dorothy didn’t say “yes” right away. “I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Let me think about it awhile.’ ” Three months passed before she made up her mind.
“I love him more now than I did when we got married,” she says. “When I first loved him, it was one of those romantic, ethereal kinds of things. But now it’s a mature, caring relationship. We can count on each other, and that’s very important as you get older in life.”
Like the Bongiornos, the Pilones say their belief that marriage is a lifetime commitment helped them through the rough times, as did their strong religious beliefs.
“One of the most important things is being polite to each other, being as nice to each other as you would be for a friend. Too many couples take each other for granted. They don’t dress for each other, they become sloppy. But he still does things like thanking me for making dinner. Little things like that make a big difference,” Dorothy says.
Kathy and Pierre Turgeon of San Clemente--she’s 47; he’s 51--will celebrate their 28th wedding anniversary July 9.
“We are not physically the giddy 19- and 23-year-olds we once were, but we are still very much in love,” Kathy writes.
They met at a ski convention in Detroit. “Neither of us ski,” Kathy says. “It just seemed like a good place for a party.”
He was captivated by a beautiful blonde across the room. Pierre decided to ask her to dance, but by the time he crossed the floor, someone else had beaten him to it, so he turned to her friend, a redhead.
“Just think, I might be married to a fat blond lady now,” Pierre says.
Although they too went into marriage confident that it would last forever, the Turgeons had doubts at times as they watched relationships founder around them.
The Turgeons were separated themselves once, for all of two weeks. “We had an argument,” Pierre says. “I moved to a motel. But then when I came back to check on the dog--that was my excuse--we started talking and we got back together.”
“I can’t tell you how many times I walked out and said I wasn’t coming back,” Kathy says. “We both did. But we always came back.”
Too many couples believe that if they love each other, the marriage will take care of itself, Kathy says. “But you have to work at it. You have to plan, to do things that keep it exciting. And you have to be prepared for change. Nothing stays the same in a marriage.”
“It would be great if you could put out a little book, you know, this is how you do it,” Pierre says. “But that’s something every couple has to figure out for themselves.”
A father’s gift
Instead of buying Dad a tie this year, why not give him a different kind of Father’s Day gift by sharing what he has given you with Family Life readers? Tell us about the most important lesson your father taught you.
And that’s, uh, Uncle Harry
Does your family have a black sheep? Someone you would just as soon not invite to the reunion or leave out of the family album? Tell us about the person you would rather not be related to. Or if you are the one they love to hate, tell us how you feel about not fitting in.
Separate checks or community property?
How does your family divvy up the money--and the household bills? Do you have his and her checkbooks? Is it all marked “ours”? If one of you earns considerably more than the other, does that affect your family financial system? Do you fight over money? Tell us how it works--or doesn’t work--for you.
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