Chip and MarcieI have always enjoyed true romantic stories, so with that in mind, I am starting a new feature here on Incurable-Romantic: your romantic stories! Kicking things off, I would like to share with you Chip and Marcie’s story. I just recently met Chip in a forum, and seems that we are kindred spirits in things romantic. Their story mirrors ours (Dawne and I) in many respects, so it just seems fitting to start with it. It reflects my own experience of “Love will overcome all”. Here’s the tale, in Chip’s own words:

It was the first day of school in 1971 and the first day of acappella choir. Into the room walked this gorgeous girl. She was about 5’2” 100 lbs and had long brown hair. “MMM,” I said to myself, “I’ve got to meet her!” Well I did meet her through a mutual friend. Our relationship was on and off for a while, but soon became VERY on, too on in fact. You see, we became sexually involved after 4 or 5 months. We thought we knew the times of the month that she would get pregnant, but one time we had sex at the wrong time. She got pregnant. Needless to say, it was a very traumatic time as we told our parents and tried to figure out what to do. We decided to get married. The baby was as much my responsibility as it was hers and I really did love her. I could not imagine not being with her. I know that may sound strange…that a 17 your old kid could know that, but somehow I did. We married on July 15, 1972.

There were several things that contributed to our first years being very difficult. We had no money, so we moved in with my dad for the first year of marriage until I finished high school. Then, 6 months later, our first son was born. In June, we moved to a different state so I could attend college. But the biggest problem was the fact that I cold be a real jerk. If I did not get the sex I wanted, I would make life miserable for Marcie. She would then withdraw physically and sexually. This would only make me madder. This cycle would continue for days. In the mean time, our growing family (3 boys in all) was causing a strain. We were having discipline problems with all 3 of them!! I was not much help with the kids or around the house.

But we kept plugging away. We were committed to make this work. Divorce was rampant in our families. Between our parents there were a combined 14 divorces! We were determined to make it. We read books, attended seminars. The hardest person to change is me…it is easy to find everything wrong with my wife!! An amazing thing happened. The more I changed, the more she changed. I had to take responsibility for me. We had some great counseling in the early 90’s. The greatest outcome of that was taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. (I am INFP, she is ISTJ) It turns out that we are opposite in 3 out of the 4 areas and my personality is more often shared my women, hers by men. I am the touchy-feely one in our relationship; she is the more logic-based one. Another great revelation came through reading “The Five Love Languages” by Dr. Gary Chapman. My love languages are physical touch and quality time while hers are words or affirmation and acts of service. No wonder she could not feel sexually intimate with me while I was making cutting remarks to her and not helping around the house!!!!

Today things are great. We are best friends, and passionate lovers. However, it took many years to get to where we are today. I am so glad we did not give up!! We are alone (the kids are gone) and we are enjoying our love life tremendously. We even work together so we are together most of the day…and we never get tired of each other!! We look forward to our days off when we can relax, take long walks, and have romantic evenings taking a long time at love-making. It is a bit of heaven on earth! We celebrated our 35th anniversary in July with a VERY romantic week in Playa del Carmin, Mexico.

To read more about Chip and Marcie, check out Two in Harmony.

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