Longtime Valentines

John and Ellen Hart of West Milford grew up in the same apartment building in New York City but didn’t meet until they both were working at a hospital there. They will be married 43 years in May.

Question: How did you guys meet?

John: Well, we’re originally from Manhattan, and we met both working at a hospital. We had part-time jobs. Ellen was working at the gift shop in the hospital, and I was working on the hospital’s old-plug switchboard and I used to go right across the corridor into the gift shop to get my peanut M&Ms that I absolutely love. One day, I noticed this very cute girl working there and we decided to strike up a conversation and little did we know that ...

Ellen: Yeah, we grew up in the.same neighborhood, but I went to Catholic school and he went to public school so we never met until we went all the way uptown to work at the hospital.

John: What were the odds that in a hospital in New York City, which has 8 million people, that she and I would end up living in the same housing development downtown but never met each other. And so we started dating. And here we are almost 43 years later.

Question: Who controls the TV remote?

Ellen: I control the remote. Yes, I do, absolutely. Usually when we go downstairs, I immediately grab all the remotes and pick the right seat. I flip a lot and way too fast as far as he’s concerned.

John: I must agree with my Ellen. Ellen controls the remote. I don’t even go anywhere near it and I’m going to get my hand slapped, but she does not only control the remote to watch the TV, but when we’re watching something, she always she flips the remote or controls in such a way that the bottom of the screen - she must go about 80 miles an hour. We’ll see what else is on at that time. And it’s unbelievable to watch a television show with this.

Ellen: You just never know when something better is going to be on.

Q: How do you not kill each other when conflict inevitably arises?

Ellen: It doesn’t happen overnight, but you learn to talk to each other. And we know each other really well by now. I mean we started dating in our 20s and now we’re in our 60s, so we’ve been through a lot. You learn how to speak to each other and you sit down and you. talk things through. You really have to do that. He’s a lot more even-tempered. I’m not. He tends to calm me down a little bit and we work things out.

John: It wouldn’t be accurate in our case to say that after 43 years we’ve never had a fight or never had an argument. Our relationship has evolved over time. We were newlyweds and you evolve into best friends, especially if you have a family. You’re together as a team in raising your family so you become, as Ellen said, very attuned to each other and to what the long-term goals are for the family. So along the way you’re going to have some arguments and make some compromises, but you always try and do it respectfully and also with the long-term plan in the back of your head. Have there been times when we’ve gone to bed without talking to each other? Yes, but looking back, it hasn’t been that many times. Invariably, one of us will give in and one of us will say, ‘You know what? I’m sorry.’ Or, ‘Let’s talk about that.’ I don’t like this feeling of walking around on eggshells and waiting for the other person to say something first so we work it out that way and that served us very well.

Q: How did you guys end up in West Milford?

Ellen: (to John) That’s your story.

John: Both of us grew up in apartments in Manhattan. Our daughter was 6 years old and the public schools were becoming not a good option in Manhattan, and we wanted to have a backyard somewhere so that she could ride a bike and we didn’t have to worry about well, don’t go past First Avenue or don’t go here or don’t get in the elevator.by yourself. We wanted to have more of a kind of a country life. I was working at the time in Rockland County and we started looking at Rockland County, but the houses that we could afford were very, very close together and we wanted a little bit more space, so we took that that distance radius and we started moving it over into northern New Jersey. I happened to know this area because when I was growing up in Manhattan, my best friend had a country house in Upper Greenwood Lake and so I was familiar with the area. This was the old Jungle Habitat days and so I said, ‘Let’s try West Milford.’ We looked at the houses that were available, Ellen fell in love with it and we are extremely happy that we’ve made the choice to live here in West Milford.

Ellen: I fell in love with it, I really did.

John: Here now 30 years. And I could never see myself going back and living in a city again. We love to be close enough to take advantage of its opportunities and restaurants and museums and things like that and family, but this is our home.

Ellen: Yeah, it really is.

Q: What transpired in the past 43 years that you’re most proud of?

Ellen: Well, we’ve always considered ourselves a team. We have two wonderful children. Our daughter is a CPA and she’s married and has three children, and our son is a doctor and he’s getting married in November to another doctor who is wonderful. So, we’re very happy with how everybody grew up and who they’re going to marry and who they’ve married. We’ve always counted our blessings in that respect, and we just did things the way we needed to do things, and John went back to school at one point. I was working and then we switched things. We always had a plan and that seemed to have worked very well for us.

John: I think I would agree. I think that your children are probably the best thing that you do. We we’re very, very fortunate. They’ve picked wonderful people. And aside from being successful professionally, each of them - they’re good people. They have a good sense of values. They have good judgment and I think that we’re most proud of that.

Ellen: That’s very true. They’re very good people. They’re just nice people you want to be around and it makes us proud to be able to be with them and hang out with them now as adults you know. They’re 36 and 31, so they’re no longer kids, so we enjoy their company and I think they enjoy ours, so we have a good time together.

John: Yeah, I would say I would agree, and I would say that I think I’m most proud of our work in getting them set on a good path forward, a good foundation for the rest of their life.

Q: What advice would you give young couples today?

Ellen: I think part of it is really being a team working together, especially when you’re raising children. You know they tend to know when you split so you want to really be a team all the way through. Don’t let things fester. Talk through things, come to a happy compromise and laugh a lot. We laugh a lot and that’s a big thing for us. We enjoy each other’s company and just having a good laugh once in a while. So, I think that you got to keep laughing.

John: I think I would tend to agree with that advice. You just can’t sweat the small stuff on the way to getting that long-term goal. We used that to get through difficult times. There were times when I would go back to school to get my degrees and we were living paycheck to paycheck. It can put some pressure on you as a family unit, but again you look at where you want to be and where you’re going and that gets you through.

Q: Do you think having the same long-term goals helped you last as long as you have?

Ellen: I think so. We look back now, and we think that really works for us. We might have had tough times. He was going to school on Saturdays. We had a little girl, and he was working all week so it was very difficult. But we knew it was for something better and now we look around and go, ‘Wow, we did the tight thing.’

John: Yes, having the long-term goal means that you’re in it for the long haul. You’re seeing the future, you’re seeing the destination. You’re not seeing the road getting there. You can be too short-sighted if you’re not seeing where you want to try and be. I think it’s critically important to be agreed on where you want to go. I don’t think there’s much of anything that I would change in terms of how we lived our life or what we went through. I am a believer that everything happens for a reason so I think that having that plan and working as a team really, really saw us through and there’s very, very little I would change.

Q: What is it about the other person that you love the most? How do you think that has helped your relationship last 43 years?

Ellen: He makes me laugh all the time. He’s got a great sense of humor and he’s just a very caring, nurturing person.

John: I know I can always count on Ellen to be the voice of reason.

Ellen: That’s something I grew into. I wasn’t always that way.

John: It’s very important when you’re married to be able to bounce things off your spouse. ‘What do you think about this? I’m reacting this way, what do you think? Am I crazy? Am I on the right track?’ And I can be a bit animated in my thinking and in how I act out sometimes. I mean, I’m try never to be rude, but I can always count on Ellen to be level-headed and the voice of reason and to keep me on track. She’s always the one to say. ‘I think that you know if you look back, you might want to change the way that you reacted to that.’ She’s never been wrong. I can always count on her to do that.

Ellen: Important, yeah, but you also are open to that. A lot of people aren’t, and that’s really a big key is that you are open to listening to people. You know when I have something to say to you or the kids have something to say to you. You’re very open to listen. You don’t react and say like no, no.

* * * * * * *

Michael and Karen Joy have called West Milford their home all their lives. Thirty-two years later, they are still together.

Question: How did you guys meet?

Michael: She was dating a friend of mine.

Karen: He was dating a friend of mine.

(both giggle)

Q: Who controls the TV remote?

(said jointly)

Karen: I do.

Michael: She does.

(both start laughing)

Q: How do you not kill each other when conflict inevitably arises?

Karen: Patience, lots of patience and understanding.

Michael nods.

Q: What are you most proud of in the past 32 years?

Michael: The little guys.

Karen: Our kids. Our kids and our grandkids. We have two grand kids and we have two grandchildren.

Q: What is it about the other person that you love the most? How do you think that has helped your relationship last?

Karen: OK, so for Michael, I would say his understanding and his caring for other people. He’s part of the search and rescue. Things like that. He’s always cares about other people before himself.

Michael: She always takes care of me.

Karen: To me, it’s all about family. And you know, one of our biggest things is even as simple as having dinner together every night. We all sit at the table. My grandkids will yell at you if you have a phone at the table because they know there’s no phone at the table. Dinner time is family. That’s what we’ve always felt was more important was being together at least for an hour a day. We all sat at the table, have dinner and talk at dinner.

Michael: During the times where our kids were teenagers and you know the kids don’t want to be around. They still knew they had to be home for dinner. They still knew they had to be here because that was what was important to us. To make sure that we were together.

Karen: When we first got married, I worked with a bank, which I’ve always have. But I used to work late on Friday nights, from 6 to 8. He would feed the kids before I got home, but him and. I would sit down to dinner together. That was our time to, you know, connect for the day and make sure that you know we’re on the same page.

* * * * * * *

Christina and George Stephens were married 32 years ago. They have traveled the world together all call West Milford home.

Question: How did you meet?

Christina: We met through my old boyfriend and his old girlfriend because they were friends and we just happened to see each other.

George: Yeah, they went to the same school or something or other.

Christina: Yeah, same high school. And we saw each other at a couple of parties and he kind of caught my attention.

George: And certainly, she caught mine.

Christina: I could tell you we started dating 35 years ago last month because I remember it was January of ‘88.

George: Right, we were both very interested in each other, and it was a matter of tying up some other loose ends

Christina: I was semi-seeing my boyfriend still at that point. He wasn’t going out with the girl anymore, but they were still friends and I was kind of on the outs with the boyfriend. The ironic thing is when we ended up dating and then ended up together, he likes to tell the story about Deedee.

George: Not only did I win the girl, I took his dog.

Christina: Not on purpose. The dog came from him originally and he just wasn’t really interested in keeping the dog anymore. And I love the dog, so we joked that he got the dog and me.

Q: How do you not kill each other when conflict inevitably arises?

George: We’ve been through a number of seasons both one way and the other, and there have been some very stormy parts.

Christina: I think you learn more and more the longer you’re together. You learn more about compromise and it’s all the stereotypical things that people say, but I think it really is true: compromise and communication. Making the effort to communicate and listening. Communication is a two-way street.

George: It is indeed a two-way thing.

Christina: So, it’s not just communicating, but it’s listening to the other person when they’re communicating and figuring out the compromise to work things out.

George: I think we’ve gotten better at it over the years.

Christina: It’s a whole honeymoon for the first couple of years. And then it kind of sets in. There’s like, well, we’re, you know, we’re together. We can’t either of us imagine life without the other.

George: No, it’s like we’re two parts put together.

Christina: And those wedding vows. You say them when you get married because you know that’s the traditional wedding vows, but it’s true. It’s for better or for worse. We’ve been, you know, through a journey, and we’ve had both. For in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, and we’ve had a little bit of all of that really. Life is a journey and marriage is a journey. We’ve been through all those ups and downs and it’s using that communication and that compromise and listening to each other to work things out. Before you get married, you’re in love. You get married. And you think you really understand what love is, but the longer you’re with someone and learning about that person and vice versa and going through life. You look back and you go, yeah we were in love, but love is taking on such a stronger and different meaning.

George: It seems to me that marriage from a young, inexperienced perspective seems more like a destination than it is a journey. And it’s not.

Christina: It’s like only the beginning when you get married and have the ceremony and everything, and it’s just the beginning of this whole ...

George: it’s a journey. It really is.

Christina: Journey with adventures together.

Q: What advice would you give young couples today?

George: That’s easy to answer but it’s sometimes challenging to do, and I think it’s cherish each other. You know, moment by moment. If you’re going to get married, make that commitment. These days, it’s just ‘Oh, let’s get married’ and it didn’t work out six months later and they’re apart. That’s not what marriage is about. It’s about making a commitment to each other and listening to each other.

Christina: It can be harder to stay married, I think, than to separate but one of the things I would say is the little things count. Sometimes I’ll make his lunch every day for work and sometimes I’ll put a card in there or a note of encouragement or something and not when he’s expecting it. Certainly at times where I feel like he would have really appreciated it. And then other times just to surprise him.

George: And I have to say that Christina comes up with some things and they just speak to me.

Christina: And then he’ll do things like usually I’m up when he gets up early for work but sometimes I’m not, especially on those mornings where I’m just tired and I’m not ready to get up yet and he’ll surprise me. I’ll come down and he’s into doing like the hand pours for coffee. I’ll come down after he’s left for work and he will have made one and left the thermos of coffee on the counter for me, which is a total surprise. It means a lot and you know it’s the little things. It doesn’t cost anything or very minimal, but it says a lot, yeah?

George: It really is.

Q: What is it about the other person that you love the most? How do you think that has helped your relationship last 32 years?

Christina: With George I would say it’s kind of two things together. He’s patient and he’s supportive. He’s always been patient. But I think he’s gotten more and more supportive of me and our marriage over the years and I really think that’s what’s helped keep us together. You’re there for me and you support me in the trials and tribulations, you support me in the good times and the bad times, you support me in your willingness to eat whatever crazy concoctions of meals I come up with. And you’re very patient.

George: Well, I really don’t know where to start. I don’t know how many dinners and lunches that you’ve prepared. Maybe there was one or two that I really didn’t like. There could be nothing in the cabinets and she’ll still put it together. I don’t think my patience compares to your patience because anyone that’s been with me for 32 years has a lot of patience. It’s the way that you love me, it’s just the way we are together. We can’t imagine going on without each other. It doesn’t register, it just doesn’t register.