The Elusive Secret of a Happy Marriage

You want answers, you ask the experts. So we’re talking to Lee Wesley Gibson and his wife, Beatrice, about Valentine’s Day. It’s morning and she’s in her usual spot, on the easy chair in front of the space heater, watching “The Price Is Right.” He’s in his usual spot too--never far away.

“Now, what can we tell you?” he offers, smiling hospitably, a retired railroad porter who ended his second career as a tax preparer only this year. Well, you reply, the editors thought you might have something to say about romance. Your daughters tell us you recently celebrated your 71st anniversary. That’s longer than some lifetimes.

This amuses the experts. It’s also what happens, they note, when people marry at 17.

“Met in high school in Texas,” he chuckles. (Teen marriage? Do the editors know this?)

“It was at the county fair,” she chimes in. “He was with another lady, and he came over and started to talk to me. I told him his good friend was gonna come and get him, but he just wouldn’t leave.”

Must have been tough to have married so young.

“Seventeen was young then,” he nods, “and still is.”

“But we were in looooove.” She claps her hands, laughing. “We ran off, because we thought nobody would let us if we asked.”

“Except my mama,” he interjects, laughing harder. “She thought you were rich and would take care of me!”

So you weren’t from the same social stratum either?

“My family had land and a store,” she says.

“And my mother was a domestic. Worked for $3 a week.”

Good thing their friends were supportive, right?

Wrong again. She’ll never forget how the town talked when he came to Los Angeles in 1935, searching for work. “Oh, you should have heard ‘em: ‘That’s the last you’ll be seeing of him.’ ”

*

Well, you try to warn the editors, but editors never listen: There’s nothing more fraught with exceptions than the formula for married romance. This is why other romances--puppy love, endless love, etc.--get the Valentine’s Day air time. Happy marriage is like happiness in general. You generally have to be one of the happy ones to understand.

Even the two people in the couple don’t always get it, or if they do, they don’t want to jinx it by spelling it out. Ever notice how those Reader’s Digest articles on how to improve your marriage always include about three things that, for most people, would require personality transplants? Gene mapping couldn’t be more complicated than parsing the secrets of the happy spouse.

Still, you want answers, so you ask the experts. It is, after all, nearly Valentine’s Day. How did their love last, with so many seeming strikes against it? Perhaps their obstacles were few and far between.

So the Gibsons of South-Central Los Angeles continue their story: how he worked extra jobs to support his wife and four children. How they lost their only son, his namesake, to cancer at the heartbreaking age of 28. How their children struggled to replicate their good fortune.

“Everybody has tough times,” he says, ticking off enough crises to fill a couple of divorce courts. “You just gotta hurdle over ‘em.”

*

Seventy-one years. Calvin Coolidge was president when Lee Wesley Gibson fell in love with Beatrice Woods at that Texas fair. Seventy-one years since the baby of the family told her folks she was going to school and skipped off instead to meet her beau on the bridge, since he spirited her away to the courthouse with a friend.

This is romance: the feel of your heart, whirling like the lights of a midway. The sense that, until this love, you were only halfway alive.

And this is romance: an 88-year-old couple in a white bungalow, nibbling poundcake, watching Bob Barker. Six grandchildren, 16 great-grandchildren, seven great-great-grandchildren. At last count.

“What’s the secret?” Beatrice smiles at Lee Wesley.

“Love. Love,” says the man who made her breakfast this morning, the man for whom she’ll cook dinner tonight.

“Love,” she echoes, fiercely. “And I wouldn’t let nobody tell me nothing about him. I wasn’t going to let no other woman take him. I wasn’t going to have no second thoughts.”

So that’s it? Love and stubbornness? You’d like to pursue this line of questioning, but the experts are weary and her arthritis is acting up. So one last question: What do experts do on their 71st Valentine’s Day?

They pause in astonishment.

“Oh, we don’t celebrate Valentine’s,” they reply, amid peals of laughter. “Nope. We never have.”

*

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. E-mail: shawn.hubler@latimes.com