Always and Forever

Eight years ago, I met Jim in a northern university. He looked so handsome. But I had my beloved man Elle.

Elle was my idol. I fell in love with Elle. The talented boy always had a shining smile when I met him in the school museum on my first term at university. He was good at Chinese calligraphy and also an excellent Kung Fu performer, which made him a popular man among girls in our university.

However, I had little chance to chat with Elle and I found that this was because he kept an unusually close relationship with another girl. Although he told me that he always loved me, I couldn't forgive him.

During that period, Jim came to me and encouraged me to walk out of the dilemma. He often invited me to go for walks and told all kinds of funny stories to make me laugh.

Once, we went across a road, and a wild car rushed at me. Jim pushed me to the roadside and fell over himself. Fortunately, he was not seriously hurt.

Later, he told me that he loved from the first moment we met. But I don't know whether I had fallen in love with him. I preferred that we were just friends.

In 2005, Jim, Elle and I graduated from our university. At the graduation party, I told Jim "If we meet again at an appropriate time, let's get married; If not, let's forget each other."

To my surprise, Jim didn't accept the teaching job provided by our university. I knew that he always wanted to be a teacher.

Three years after graduation, Jim came to Beijing and got a job as a civil servant. One day, he suddenly telephoned me "Is it an appropriate time now?"

"Yes." I answered with tears.

Now, Jim is my husband. We usually tell each other, "To the world, you may be a person; but to a person, you maybe the whole world."

Teen Marriage Endures the Test of Time

By Kathleen Green

After 50-plus years, Ron Westmoreland and Betty Stewart Westmoreland can sit on their back porch for hours and never run out of things to talk about. "To me, she's still 16 years old. She was a cutie. Still is," he says of his high-school sweetheart. "She's my best friend and always has been. We're one."

Ron and Betty's Fort Worth families were very close, but it wasn't until they were teenagers that they really started talking. Ron was one year ahead in school.

He remembers walking Betty and her best friend (who was Ron's neighbour) from Polytechnic High School back to the junior high in 1949. But a bashful Ron also knew that Betty was popular and always had a boyfriend. A year later, Ron and Betty saw each other again when students headed to the gym after a football game. They've been together ever since.

"My daddy was very upset when I started dating Ronnie," says Betty, now 72. She and Ron didn't find out until years later that her dad was once engaged to Betty's mom, but she broke it off. Apparently it still stung after all those years.

"Ronnie's aunt told us, 'It was written in the stars. You were born for each other,'" Betty says. "I was shocked."

"She was a free spirit before they knew what that was," says Ron, also 72. "She's the happiest person I've ever been around in my life. Everybody loves her." With a possible Korean War draft, Ron suggested that they get married before he turned 18.

Then they decided not to wait even that long. On 28 April 1951, Betty's best friend's mom took Ron and Betty to a county clerk's home. When they were asked their age, both said they were 18, and they were pronounced man and wife. It was their little secret.

"We both went home after we got married," she says. "Nobody knew about it for weeks." Until one day in May when Betty got home and her father asked, "Betty, how long have you been married?"

Betty says they never figured out who leaked the news, but they guessed it was an old boyfriend. After school was out that summer, Betty and Ron made it official when they moved in together.

Before the next summer, they reached a major milestone. "

When I was in the hospital having our first baby at 17, Ronnie's mother came in crying. I was having a very hard time.

They thought I was going to die because I had toxemia or eclampsia. She said, 'You should be going to the prom,'" Betty recalls. "But I didn't want to go to the prom." Betty was happy with her choices. Son Ricky was born 26 March 1952.

"We were parents at 17, and it was pretty difficult," says Ron, who worked for Santa Fe Railroad for a while before taking a job with Chance Vought Aircraft in 1955.

"She took to motherhood like she'd done it all her life." They had daughter Glenda on 12 November 1954, and son Bryan on 15 May 1956.

"Those kids were always sparkling," says Ron, who later earned a high school equivalency certificate and attended some college. "I'd come home from work, and she'd be playing paper dolls with our daughter.

Those are the memories you never forget about. Family means everything."

In 1959, Ron took a job with Marquardt Corporation, which meant moving the family to Ogden, Utah. But on a trip back to Fort Worth in late 1961, they realised how much they missed their relatives. Ron and Betty left their kids with Betty's mom that Thanksgiving and headed back to Utah to collect their furniture.

"We knew it was going to be hard, and there would be trying times. And it was rough," he says. "We were two kids raising kids. We weren't that much older than they were."

They stayed in Fort Worth a while, then moved to Blue Ridge, northeast of Dallas, when Ron got a job with Collins Radio (now Rockwell Collins). They moved to Richardson in 1964.

Over the years, Betty stood by Ron as he shared his love of horses and rodeos with their kids. She spent many hours in arenas watching her boys rope and her daughter barrel-race, which included the usual injuries. "That was very hard, but I had to be there," she says.

"It's pretty bad when the emergency-room staff knows you when you walk in and they start pulling your file.

The youngest broke his back when he was 16," from which he's had a full recovery. Then there was a punctured lung, broken arms, broken legs.

Betty worked for a while as a receptionist at a veterinary hospital to help with the kids' college expenses.

In 1974, after the Westmorelands' youngest graduated from Berkner High School in Richardson, Ron and Betty moved to Caddo Mills. They wanted property for their horses. Ron still ropes, and the kids still love horses.

"We're very proud of our kids," Betty says. "They're very good people. Good citizens, thoughtful. We have a lot of pride in them."

Since retiring in 1990 as an international program manager for Rockwell, Ron worked briefly with the Superconducting SuperCollider in Ellis County. And he's also published five books, including one for children: Wild Horses of Hidden Valley.

"He's been easy to love," Betty says. "I never worried about him taking care of us." They now have 8 granddaughters and 7 great-grandkids.

"It's been a great run," he says. "I wouldn't change a thing."

Betty and Ron Westmoreland say they have no regrets about defying convention by marrying during high school.
"She was a free spirit before they knew what that was," Ron says of Betty.

Who Says That You Can`t Find Love At 60?

By ShirLee M.

I was on Yahoo! Personals for quite some time and met many nice people through the years -- many of whom have become good friends -- but I had not found that one special person who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

My daughters told me I was very picky, which I am. After being married most of my life and raising a family, then being a widow for more than 12 years and becoming independent, you know what you like and what you don't like.

I appreciated Yahoo! Personals for its reasonable cost and the wide range of members. I always enjoyed reading the success stories, especially the ones about the couples who were looking for partners after being married most of their lives and then finding themselves single.

Finding Warren introduced me to a most wonderful and exciting man.

He captured my heart and soul, and now we are planning our wedding.

He captured my heart and soul, and now we are planning our wedding. We are excited about all the hopes and dreams we will be able to share for the rest of our lives. We will be a wonderful family with our children and grandchildren, and who knows, eventually maybe even great grandchildren.

Warren's daughter-in-law had encouraged him to join Yahoo! Personals. He told me he must have looked at my picture and profile a hundred times before getting up enough nerve to contact me. He thought I would not be interested in a teacher, since my headline said I was a "CEO looking for COO."

We have so much in common, and through the years our paths seemed to cross over in many areas. We even went back and attended university classes in education at the same school to finish our degrees. We feel as if we have known each other our whole lives, kind of like, "We've been there or done this together before."

Yahoo! Personals gave Warren and me the tools to find each other under conditions that were designed for business professionals like ourselves, who don't always have the time or means to socialize or actively look for a mate.

We feel like a couple of teenagers in love and it is absolutely wonderful!

Russian Couple Reunited After 60 Years Apart

By Will Stewart in Moscow and Gethin Chamberlain

When Anna Kozlov caught sight of the elderly man clambering out of a car in her home village of Borovlyanka in Siberia, she stopped dead in her tracks, convinced her eyes were playing tricks.

There, in front of her, was Boris, the man she had fallen in love with and married 60 years earlier. The last time she had seen him was three days after their wedding, when she kissed him goodbye and sent him off to rejoin his Red Army unit.

By the time he returned, Anna was gone, consigned by Stalin’s purges to internal exile in Siberia with the rest of her family as an enemy of the people. They left no forwarding address.

Frantic, Boris tried everything he could to find his young bride, but it was no good. She was gone.

Now, more than half a century later, they were reunited, an extraordinary coincidence leading them both to return to their home village on the very same day.

“I thought my eyes were playing games with me,” Anna said. “I saw this familiar looking man approaching me, his eyes gazing at me. My heart jumped. I knew it was him. I was crying with joy.”

Now 80 years old, Boris had returned to visit his parents’ grave. As he stepped out of the car, he looked up to see Anna standing by her old house, where they had lived for the few days after the wedding.

“I ran up to her and said: 'My darling, I’ve been waiting for you for so long. My wife, my life...’”

They stayed up all night, talking about everything that had happened to them and the cruel circumstances that tore them apart. They met when he was secretary of the Young Communists and had to make a speech in the village.

Afterwards, she was standing there in a circle of friends, but he had eyes only for her. Her father had been purged by Stalin before the war for refusing to work in a collective farm, but Boris did not care. She was too beautiful for words. “I loved her and would always defend her,” he recalled.

So the romance blossomed. When he came home from the front, she was always there, waiting. In 1946, they married. It was a hasty wedding; there was no time for anything else and they could not afford anything grand in those hard years after the war.

Three days later, he had to return to his unit. “We kissed goodbye - but I never expected we wouldn’t see each other for more than half a century,” Anna said.

A little while later, the state caught up with her. Like her father, she was branded an enemy of the people and forced with the rest of her family into internal exile in Siberia.

“I threatened to commit suicide rather than go because I couldn’t live without him,” she said, “but in the end I was forced to go. It was the most miserable time of my life.”

On his return, Boris was distraught. “She was always waiting for me when I came home, but this time there was no sign of her,” he said. “Nobody knew where they were, or what had happened to Anna. That’s how we lost any track of each other”.

In their new village, Anna’s mother resolved that the girl should remarry. She told her that Boris had remarried. “She said he had forgotten about me - that’s why no letters came.

“I didn’t believe it and I longed for him so much. But one day I got back home from work at a timber plant and my mum had burned all his earlier letters, poems and pictures - including our wedding photographs.

“She told me this other man was coming to meet me - and that I should go out with him, and if I was lucky, he’d marry me. I burst into tears and rushed into the yard. The world turned black for me. I wanted to die and I got a clothes line and went into the hayloft intending to hang myself.

“My mother came in and slapped me in the face and told me not to be so stupid. She persuaded me to go out with this man, Nefed, and gradually he and my mother persuaded me that this was where my future lay.”

Boris, too, finally gave in and re-married. He became a writer, penning a book dedicated to the woman he’d married as a young soldier but only ever spent three nights with.

In time, their respective spouses died. With the demise of the Soviet Union, Anna was once more able to travel home. Then came the chance reunion. “I felt the same when we met last year,” Boris said. “I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Yes I had loved other women when we were separated. But she was the true love of my life.”

He suggested they marry again. Anna resisted, but says he talked her round. “What’s the point, I said, we can just live together they rest of our lives? But he insisted. I never thought I’d be a bride at my age but it was my happiest wedding.

“Since we found each other again, I swear we haven’t had a single quarrel. We’ve been parted for so long and who knows how much is left for us, so we just don’t want to lose time on arguing.”

Husband

“Are you happy being a full-time wife and mom?” my husband asked me one sunny afternoon. After being married for almost 10 years now, he simply could not believe that I am his wife, whom he knew as an ambitious, workaholic, perfectionist and goal driven lady survived a domesticated life. He was even amazed that I was happy and contented with it.

He would asked me, “Love, when we got a chance to have a lot of money, all the things you wanted to do with your life, all your plans and dreams, I promise I’ll reach them for you.”

I was an internet person and sometimes, when he saw me looking at my friends photos and profiles at this particular networking site, he would tell me, “Don’t feel jealous, or envious, you are wise, you’re much luckier than them because you are living a happy and almost perfect marriage.”

I always wonder if this is his way of comforting me from something I don’t feel, or just a way of convincing himself that I am truly happy with him.

I told him about relationship advices I have read about keeping one's individuality and independence, of not totally submitting yourself to your mate in order not to lose your identity and self worth, of keeping some things secret to keep the mystery and passion alive in a marriage. We both laugh about it and said it was all trash.

Now I know he was happy and proud of the fact that independent “me” trusted him with all my life. This strong lady still looked up to him as my tower of strength. That this wise lady listened with awe at the things he would teach. And that this introvert child-woman in me has bared her life to him in complete transparency.

That this stubborn lady believed and lived her marriage according to one Biblical principle " Husbands love your wives, and wives submit to your husband"

And I am glad i did so too...

It doesn’t matter if we started out our marriage with petty quarrels and irrational temper tantrums, and with hurtful accusations and jealous reactions over his non-existent "mistress" ( i was jealous of all women around him, even his car lift driver who was old enough to be my grandmother), in the end, everything became perfect, because I gave my ALL. And he saw it, felt it, and never held back in giving his ALL too and since he saw that he (and and our daughter) had become the most important person in my life, in return, I had become and was treated the most important person/woman in his life too.

Then I knew, my childhood dreams and plans were just reflections of my one great dream in life - to be a wife who, in all her capacity, is someone whom her husband can really call, "my life partner" and "for richer or for poorer", “in sickness and in health”, and to be a mother who is also her child's best friend.

I found and lived the essence of being woman.

When the time comes, I will be able to say, I loved my man enough to give up my dreams for him, enough to merge my identity with his, to live my life in his life. And no, I was never a doormat, for the moment my man saw I was willing to submit to him, our marriage became a partnership, of equal giving and taking; his and mines’ dreams, goals and plans became OURS. There was total transparency between us, we understood what every little action and word meant, making everything more meaningful instead. It’s just so sad and frustrating he left me so early. He widowed me young.

Wives love your husband with more than you can give. You never know when he will be taken away from you. Treat every day as if it were your last with him, never hold anything back, so when time comes, you can truthfully say you never had any regrets.

I felt scared. I feel like losing myself.

I found a husband who was almost perfect to be true; been happy every second of my life we were together. Even in his death, the love he left me with remains enough to keep me for another lifetime.