MONROVIA – Lwopu Mae-Bruce’s husband makes everyday feel like Valentine’s Day – and for 40 years the couple has shared a strong relationship “worthy of the most romantic poems”.
The 65-year-old woman is still madly in love with a man she met after the coup in 1980.
“He made everyday feel like a special anniversary, he just made me feel like I was on top of the world, I love him very much,” she told FrontPageAfrica.
Bruce and Lwopu are parents and grandparents.
Both say there was a definite attraction when they met the first time. Bruce, 71, remembers a very attractive woman in those early days, adding the seeds of that love started early.
“I met my wife in 1980 right after the coup, she was at the University of Liberia with my cousin when she came to visit him to do her physics assignment and from that moment I took to her beauty,” he said.
“She looked like a black angel, her black fluffy hair captivated me and I said to myself: ‘what a black beauty?’ he said.
He added: “So, it was all those attributes that attracted me to her and most of all, it was the manner in which she responded to me after we were introduced and that drew me to her”.
Attraction alone won’t keep a couple together. Both say they have been lucky.
For Lwopu, it was love at first sight. “Then, I said I was not too good at math, this was why I had kept putting it off until my senior year. Because he was reading math major and physics minor at the university, he said to me, do you believe that I can help you in your lesson so that you can get an ‘A’ in the course? In disbelief, I said “me getting an ‘A’ in physics?
“But he helped me and you won’t believe I got a ‘B’ in my physics course that year. The way he had patience in teaching me, I began to develop some feelings for him than the physical attraction between us,” she said.
“I saw a man with a lot of potential, because academically he was strong and I knew he would have made a good partner,” she said.
Lwopu said commitment is the secret to a long marriage life. “Being committed and supportive is very important,” she said.
” Always be supportive of one another. He was supportive when I wanted to get higher education and I was supportive when he went for his masters. As a young lady you should be respectful and know that your husband is the head of the home,” she said.
Continuing, she added: “You should be different from ‘girls’, our old people referred to as “girls from a house,” she said.
Asked whether she knew Bruce would have married her, Lwopu replied: “I had come out of a bad relationship and asked God for someone who would be my own husband. And not long after I had prayed, I met Bruce,” she said.
“Then, I asked myself is this the person that God has sent me? I was surprised when he asked me to marry me. Imagine, I had just come out of college and every young woman’s dream is to find a husband, so it came as a shock because I was still praying when he came,” she said.
The pair say disagreements and even arguments are inevitable.
Bruce says it all comes down to how you deal with the conflict. “If I can’t say that we never had disagreements, I would be a liar, but, however, we would have our arguments, go and come back and get over it,” he said.