What Kept Our Interracial Marriage Together for Fifty Years?

Two colors, one love.

People ask how Susan and I have lasted this long, and how I still enjoy her more than the day we met. There’s no secret. Just a few things we live by.

Respect and honor each other like your life depends on it. Respect isn’t given once and checked off. It’s chosen every day, in the small moments no one sees.

“Honor each other like your life depends on it, because it does.”

Treat it like a partnership. Serve each other. Two people, each doing their part, looking out for the other instead of just themselves.

Serve each other, and the reward is a relationship money can’t buy.

“Serve each other, and the payment is a priceless relationship.”

Take time to laugh. Don’t get so busy building a life that you forget to enjoy it. Some of our strongest glue was simple laughter.

“A marriage that laughs together stays together.”

Keep the right things first. We put God first and kept everything else in its proper order. Get the order right, and the rest falls in behind it.

“Get the order of your life right, and everything else falls in behind it.”

Make your home a sanctuary. The world is hard enough out there. Home should be the one place you both get to breathe.

“Make your home the one place the world can’t follow you in.”

Don’t let the world write your story. When we married, the world had little kindness for a Black man and a white woman. We decided early not to let its opinions set the terms of our love.

Where others saw two colors, we saw one thing: the soul, made in the image of God.

And when the voices got loud, we had an anchor. If God is for us, who can be against us? The only approval we ever needed, we already had.

“See the soul, and the color the world worries about falls away.”

“If God is for us, who can be against us.”

Fifty years later, I still light up when Susan walks into the room. Not because we got lucky, but because we kept choosing each other, day after day. That’s the whole secret. There isn’t a bigger one.