S1 Ep 1 Maria Theresa & Gerard "The Language of Us"

Maria Teresa and Gerard met as students studying in the South of France. She is from Peru and he is from the UK but they communicated for the first few years of their relationship in their second language, the language of Love, French. Theirs is a story about how love is wide enough to cross an ocean, forge its own path and embrace the adventure of building a life together.

In this episode we talk about parental disapproval, long distance relationships, and blending cultures in a family.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Before we begin, I'd like you to take a moment to put a hand on your heart. You feel it. And once you count four beats, you can put your hand down again. I'm about to introduce you to some wonderful couples who will share their hearts and this podcast space with us. I'd like you to remember that rhythm. One. Two. Three. Four. I suggest doing the same practice at the close of every episode of the Love Department. What you're about to hear is a couple in their own words telling you their love story. This is a love story designed to infiltrate the beating heart, expose its secrets, and I hope transform it. Let's be honest, the world doesn't need another romantic fairy tale. So why are you here? Because you know, and I know, that love in and of itself is not a fairy tale. It is like a house with many rooms, a play with many acts, a road with many divulging paths. From the moment we are born screaming until death's final whisper, it is love that ushers us into, through, and out of this world. And so, as the Bard Shakespeare would say, never doubt I love. Though I did it one time, that is, before I fell in it, many times, with different people in different ways, and now, as Edda James would say, at last it has found one. And that's where this podcast comes in. In me, love has slowly started its transformative work and its life-saving surgery. I've noticed it happening one day, one disagreement, one compromise, one kiss, one tender moment, one gentle handhold at a time. And I know that if love can do this to me, it can do it to you. So I'd like to invite you, dear listener, to courageously brave the course of love with me. I'll quote Shakespeare again here, where he said, it never did run smooth. But oh, how's it run? Each couple interviewed has a unique love story that I think we could all learn from. And with a little luck, these lessons will slowly, softly, sweetly begin to mold us into love itself. Okay, one last time, and I promise I'll get to the show. Place your hand on your heart. One here we go.

SPEAKER_03 3:15

I wrote and said, I can't I guess I said I cannot live without you. I can't live without you, is what I said. Um it must be written down somewhere in French.

SPEAKER_04 3:27

In some letter that we should find somewhere.

SPEAKER_03 3:30

I probably got the letter.

SPEAKER_02 3:31

I've probably got the letter.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

Amor, amore, elske I pag Lib Ejong Eshuk Upendo Ife.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

These and over 7,000 more are ways to say love. No matter where it is spoken, the word carries the same meaning and power across the globe. This is episode one of the love department, the heartwarming podcast exploring the nature of relationships. I'm your host, Nick Lockhart, writer and former matchmaker turned love theorist. I'm so grateful you're here. To start the show, we're speaking with a couple whose love story spans several continents and speaks several languages. Maria Theresa and Jared have been together for over four decades. Their memory, however, is a touch fuzzy on the details of how they met.

SPEAKER_03 4:37

That was the caveat we were trying to sort of reference with the Morris Chevalian Harmonic Ingall song about ah yes, I remember it well. We met at eight. No, we met at nine. We dined alone, no, we dined with friends. Ah yes, I remember it well.

SPEAKER_06 4:56

It's from the musical Gigi. It's from the musical Gigi.

SPEAKER_03 5:00

So when when we go through this, it's like, yeah, we first met at the party in Ishigiro Shama Gushi's house.

SPEAKER_06 5:08

And she goes, We can't even agree on his name.

SPEAKER_03 5:13

And she goes, No, no, we met on the beach. I said, Oh, yes, I remember it well.

unknown 5:18

No.

SPEAKER_06 5:19

No, our children said, Mom, Dad, you met in the beach. No, we didn't. You met in the party.

SPEAKER_03 5:26

One of them remembered we met at the party, the other one remembered we met on the beach.

SPEAKER_06 5:30

No, we met at school. We actually met at school. I remember it well. I remember clearly. We were at the University of Nice in France, and all the foreign students had to go to a class. And I remember we were there on the terrace. It was beautiful. And Gerald was coming in with his friend Martin. And then the other English students were also coming. And we were the Latin American contingents, you know, and we were already there. You know, we had a good grant, we were housed at university, lodgings, and everything, and the English contingents were like left to their own devices, right?

SPEAKER_03 6:12

Yeah, we were treated like the great sunwashed.

SPEAKER_06 6:16

So anyway, that's how we met. We met at this foreign students.

SPEAKER_03 6:20

That's the first time we met. So we we first got together in that room on the first day of class. Uh after that, when we sort of became sort of romantically involved, I guess, was A we went we did go to a party at the uh um that I don't remember whose apartment it was. It was Shimpashiro Ishigami. That was his name. It's his name 45 years ago, and then we did spend some time on the beach, you know, hanging out and talking, and that's where we sort of began to realize there was something more to this than that.

SPEAKER_06 6:50

I remember after the party, it was like one of those, you know, young people's parties, and everybody was asleep on the living room, you know, bodies everywhere. And I had to be somewhere, it was sunrise, right? Because I said, I I have to go. And he he said, Oh, I have to go too. And so the two of us got left the the party. And I remember this, I remember very clearly because the sky was pink. And Jared said to me in English, which I didn't really speak that well. He said, pink sky.

SPEAKER_03 7:26

Red sky in the morning is a shepherd's warning.

SPEAKER_06 7:29

It's a shepherd's warning.

SPEAKER_03 7:30

Red sky in the evening is a shepherd's warning.

SPEAKER_05 7:32

It's shepherd's delight, right?

SPEAKER_03 7:34

Yes. And I I remember that differently because we took a train from Antibes back to Nice at about seven o'clock in the morning, and that's when we had that conversation, and that part of the relationship began to build.

SPEAKER_05 7:48

That I remember. Um we talked a lot.

SPEAKER_00 7:50

We talked a lot. Okay. So there was a party and a beach somewhere in there. And Jared and Maria Theresa were speaking neither of their native languages. Which to me is even more of a miracle that they somehow still fell deeply in love by speaking the language of love.

SPEAKER_03 8:11

We communicated for the first four years of our relationship, probably in French.

SPEAKER_06 8:15

In French. Jared went to do his final year at university and I I followed him. And then my visa ran out, and also I had a commitment because I had been sent by the Alliance Francaise to become a French teacher. I felt, you know, the obligation to go back to to Lima, to Peru, to teach French at the Alliance Frances. So I went back.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

It had been three years of school in France together, three years of memories and conversations that had solidified their status as a couple. But with graduation looming, it became problematic that these two students were from entirely different parts of the world and would soon have to separate. Now, keep in mind it was the 1970s. There was no cell phone, no Instagram, or email by which to keep in touch. So they sought other ways to keep their connection strong.

SPEAKER_06 9:17

We actually said goodbye on your a a party, right? There was a party and and then you had to take me to the airport.

SPEAKER_03 9:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 9:24

Right?

SPEAKER_03 9:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 9:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 9:26

It was almost three years, I think, by the time that came around. So I'm I knew it wasn't the end, I knew it was the start of another step.

SPEAKER_06 9:35

I cried like crazy on the way back. You know, I just couldn't stop crying all the way back on the air on the airplane. Because I didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't know if this was, you know, I was going back to Latin America, imagine such a long and in those days, you know, it was worse than anything.

SPEAKER_03 10:00

She had to go back to Peru because she had this commitment to the Alliance Française. I thought she was teaching French in the Alliance Française, and I was out looking for a job. I was like just graduated from university.

SPEAKER_06 10:12

It seemed like a long time, but now that you think back, it was just a it wasn't that long, it was only a few months.

SPEAKER_03 10:17

Yeah, but we were we were writing.

SPEAKER_06 10:20

We wrote a lot of letters, we still have the letters somewhere.

SPEAKER_03 10:25

I still have them, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 10:28

And you know, that that's how you communicate it, you know, by letters.

SPEAKER_03 10:32

Pens, paper, letters. Yeah. So there was a correspondence for a long while after she went back, and then eventually it was a look we we can't carry on like this, we have to get back together.

SPEAKER_06 10:44

Yeah, and so he was telling me, Okay, I have found a job, you know, we could get married. And in the end, it was November, right? When I came back.

SPEAKER_05 10:58

I wrote and said, I can't, I guess I said I cannot live without you.

SPEAKER_03 11:03

I can't live without you, is what I said. Um must be written down somewhere in French.

SPEAKER_04 11:10

In some letter that we should find somewhere.

SPEAKER_02 11:13

I probably got the letter. I probably got the letter.

SPEAKER_00 11:17

And so Maria Teresa hopped back on a plane several months later and made her way back to Europe. This time to her admirer, who waited a little while longer for her to deplane.

SPEAKER_06 11:30

He was waiting for me at the airport, and they told me that I had to have an x-ray done. And so, as a bride to get into the UK, you had to make sure that you were not bringing tuberculosis, I guess. So they sent me to have an x-ray. In the meantime, everybody was coming out, and I wasn't, and he was freaking out because I wasn't coming out.

SPEAKER_03 11:54

If you came from a foreign country, you were considered to be some sort of risk. No matter what the risk was, no matter what they imagined it was, they were gonna go through the same nonsense for anybody coming from uh a non-British place. And I was waiting outside at the airport and took her hours to come through because I'm like, what's going on?

SPEAKER_06 12:14

And no- Maybe she's changed her mind and she didn't know.

SPEAKER_03 12:18

Yeah. But eventually she came through, and then we began to try and put together a life in England. We still spoke French.

SPEAKER_05 12:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 12:27

Um, and then we decided I had a job, and uh, she decided she needed to work in England. And at that stage, that's when we flipped from French to English.

SPEAKER_05 12:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 12:38

When she said, I need to work in England, how can we carry on here if I don't speak English? We eventually got married in November in 78. And uh I went but we went back to Birmingham, which is the city where my parents lived, to get married. Uh, but my parents refused to come to the wedding because we didn't get married in a Catholic church.

SPEAKER_05 13:00

Oh, yeah, but my parents came from Peru.

SPEAKER_03 13:02

Her parents came from Peru to the wedding. And my parents wouldn't come down the road five miles to the registry office. Because we got married civilly and not any religious.

SPEAKER_06 13:14

Exactly, because I I'm Latin American, so supposedly Catholic. But I was never really a practicing Catholic, and neither was he, which is something that attracted us to each other because we were like rebels in that respect. But his parents are from Northern Ireland. Being a Catholic is very, very important. Jared's mother couldn't understand why a Catholic Latin American baptized and everything wouldn't marry in the Catholic Church. But we just thought we couldn't do this because it would be very hypocritical.

SPEAKER_03 13:52

It was sort of the nail in the coffin with uh in a way at the time, because as a young boy, I'd spent time in the Catholic seminary trained to be a Catholic priest. And then when I got to 16, I said, Not for me, I'm leaving. And then later on we got married, and I'd already come to the stage of saying, pretty much I'm an atheist. We're not going to follow this. And that at that stage, that's when my parents sort of said, No, we're not coming to your wedding.

SPEAKER_06 14:21

Uh the worst part is that your mother said that we were dead to her.

SPEAKER_03 14:25

Yes, I remember that too. I guess I remember it well.

SPEAKER_06 14:28

We were dead to her. So so when we finally found a spot, you know, to live, well, Jared had left his stuff in her house. And I remember s we were so nervous trying to call her to find out if we could get his stuff. And when we called, she was like, nothing had happened. Oh my goodness, Jared Aria, yes, of course, of course. And she was very welcoming and everything.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

After the non-religious wedding and getting Jared's stuff from his parents' house, they set out to start a life as a young married couple. This is hard enough, but when you have two people from two entirely different cultures, well, things can begin to get rocky.

SPEAKER_03 15:13

We found a flat in a place called Reading, which was a one-bedroom flat on the third floor of an old house with a leaking roof. With a leaking roof and a fall-down bed. One room with a fall-down bed.

SPEAKER_06 15:25

It was a bedsit.

SPEAKER_03 15:26

It was a bedsit.

SPEAKER_06 15:26

It was a home bathroom downstairs.

SPEAKER_03 15:30

We shared the bathroom with four other apartments.

SPEAKER_06 15:32

But that's the only thing we could afford. I had to adjust to the way the British were so guarded. Um, I was trying to do stuff like Jared loved horseback riding. I am very afraid of horses, but I was trying. I was trying to get to learn to ride horses. I remember that. And I used to go on the bike to um a farm, a horseback um place where you could learn to drive. And I was trying. It was a disaster. But I was trying. I was trying to, you know, to join in a kind of thing.

SPEAKER_03 16:17

We all walked down the road about two miles to a pub alongside the river with a great big log fire.

SPEAKER_05 16:24

I've forgotten that.

SPEAKER_03 16:25

And we all sat there and we had um we had um hot toddies of whiskey or rum or whatever it was they gave you. And it was like that was like we were locked in. There was nowhere to go, you couldn't walk anywhere. We were on the playing fields of Eton, we're on on the in in the shadows of Windsor Castle, and it was kind of like we were part of England at that time. It was kind of for us, I think, a bit of a a statement that well, you know, this is what we came to, this is where it's at, and this is was very typically English.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

So things were looking up. They had a place to stay, her English was improving, and they were together.

SPEAKER_06 17:03

I also found a job. Yeah. I was working at the airport, I found a job. She found a job at the airport, working for an an a uh Latin American Airline, Argentine Airlines.

SPEAKER_03 17:14

So we were both working at the airport, and one of the the great beauties of this was uh as she worked for an airline, we had free tickets because you know free car rental. So we could fly all over the world and rent cars anywhere in the world. So it enabled us to keep going back to like Latin America to visit my family. Uh several times. Once once twice a year if we needed to.

SPEAKER_00 17:36

Did your time as a French student help you learn Spanish?

SPEAKER_03 17:39

No, we were we were sort of academically stoltified as British students in France. We we went and we knew all about literature. We could tell you about the conjugations of the verbs and the subjunctive and the and the agreement of adjectives. What we couldn't do was talk. We couldn't order things like a cup of coffee. It was like embarrassing. And these girls from Latin America were so far ahead of us, we would be asking them to order things for us. It was like, but when it came to writing essays and talking about Voltaire and Rabaldi and all the other, they'd come back to us and say, What did we say about that?

SPEAKER_02 18:18

And we go, oh no, we do that.

SPEAKER_03 18:20

So and that was why when I came to Spanish, I said, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna bother learning another language the way the British teach it. That was not productive. So I learned Spanish totally by ear.

SPEAKER_06 18:32

So he said to me, I'm not going to make that mistake again. So when we we went to Peru, he would say, I'm not learning Spanish, you know, with books and that. I'm just going to learn the Spanish of the streets. And he actually learned to speak Spanish very quickly because he had had this education where he learned Latin. And Latin was the base, you know, for Spanish. And he would say to me, Oh, amo, amas, amas, no, no, no. I said, Yeah, how do you know that? Oh well, you know, because of Latin. He learned very quickly. But anyway, I did find a job, and and it was because it was a Latin American airline that they needed someone that spoke Spanish. But um, that was when we were living in Slau. And then unfortunately, the uh the war started between Brazil and Argentina. So I lost my job when I had just found out that we were pregnant.

SPEAKER_00 19:38

That's right. You heard correctly. War. One could argue the exact opposite of love. Add a baby into the mix, and you've got an episode fit for primetime TV. Or I guess primetime podcasting. The Falcon War started in April of 1982, when Argentine forces invaded the British overseas territory of the Falcon Islands. It was one of the largest major conflicts since World War II. Not a great time to find out that you're expecting your first child when your country is at war.

SPEAKER_06 20:17

Ah, we found out exactly. We were doing the test when the Argentinians were invading Georgia.

SPEAKER_03 20:24

The flights from Argentina used to fly into Buenos Aires, Madrid, Amsterdam, London, or Buenos Aires, Madrid, Paris, London. So they do these steps along the way. And three or four days before the invasion, they stopped leaving European territory to come to England. So, and these people working in the office were like, well, what did we do with all these passengers with books? And what did we do with all this cargo we have to put on the planes? And they said, Well, sorry, not coming. No explanation.

SPEAKER_04 20:55

That's when we knew there was something wrong.

SPEAKER_03 20:57

And then we fit we kind of figured out something was going wrong. Because had they landed the planes in England, it would have been impounded. It would they would have impounded the planes. And interestingly enough, many years later, we had breakfast in Glasgow with Margaret Thatcher.

SPEAKER_06 21:14

You want to tell that story.

SPEAKER_03 21:16

Yeah. And Madam here says, Oh, Mrs. Thatcher, I have to tell you, I was working for Argentina Airlines when you invaded the Falklands, and I lost my job. And Mrs. Thatcher says, Oh my dear, these things happen in life. Let's move on.

SPEAKER_00 21:35

Maria Theresa and Jared went on to have three daughters Natalia, Vanessa, and Rebecca. One thing that is incredibly unique about these girls is that they were each born in different countries, which meant they each had different first languages.

SPEAKER_03 21:54

But it's funny, in our relationship, the whole everything began to revolve around the children and life without. Children. Which is normal, I think.

SPEAKER_06 22:03

It was hard because I had no family there. And he traveled a lot as well with his job. So, you know, I was I was quite alone really and I didn't have any support.

SPEAKER_03 22:17

For example, I remember being working in Paris for the longest time, and the she and Natalia came over, where they could stop with me in a nice hotel, and I would be running back and forth doing work every day going home to them in a hotel rather than back in England leaving them alone. Um so we did a lot of that.

SPEAKER_06 22:37

But Jared was really good because for me it was like a new experience, but he had had a lot of experience with nieces and nephews. So he was the one that would bathe the baby and and um he would read her books, and she was like To this day I'm still known as the baby whisperer. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 22:57

With my grandchildren, it's like the baby's crying, giving it to granddad.

SPEAKER_00 23:03

Parenting is its own kind of love, and in future seasons I hope we can explore that deeper. But there is something to be said about um giving yourself to love fully, completely, and making your life revolve around it. I can tell by speaking with them that they love their children, and that is beautiful.

SPEAKER_06 23:28

This baby, she you know, uh she had really big eyes, and the eyes would become bigger as nine o'clock would hit, like boing, and then she wouldn't go to sleep, and and she was like everybody knew that she didn't sleep. But Vanessa, on the other hand, she she was called La Santa, you know, she was so good, she would let me do everything. I in fact, we would wake up really worried to check that she was breathing because we were so used to babies waking up in the middle of the night.

SPEAKER_03 24:03

And Vanessa was Vanessa was born in Madrid, yes, and that to us was a whole different life because she was much more involved in English. She had friends, she had friends in Madrid Spanish, Natalia was having a good time at school, Vanessa came along.

SPEAKER_06 24:18

Um Vanessa only spoke Spanish, only spoke Spanish at the beginning.

SPEAKER_03 24:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 24:23

No, Natalia didn't want to speak uh Spanish when she was little, she didn't want to be different. But when she learned that we were moving to Spain, she started asking, What do you how do you say this in Spanish? You know?

SPEAKER_03 24:36

But Rebecca was born in Ireland, yeah. And funny thing, in Ireland, Natalia, our first daughter, went to school in Ireland. And after one year at school in Ireland, she became she was top of the class speaking Gaelic.

SPEAKER_06 24:49

She won the prize.

SPEAKER_03 24:51

From the outset, uh, my mother used to say to me, Why are you talking to the baby like that? I said, Because she understands. And she said, No, she's six months old. I said, She understands. Trust me. Trust me. She's listening to the tone, to the she okay, she's not understanding the word, but she's listening to the tone and the approach. And I I was always that way, that's why they always call me the baby whisperer. I would talk to the kids endlessly, and I to this day believe they all understand.

SPEAKER_06 25:21

But Vanessa was actually beginning to speak sentences in Spanish, and it was very difficult to understand her.

SPEAKER_03 25:30

And all of a sudden it was like she was not putting two and two together because she was saying this. And I I remember distinctly the school said, Does Vanessa have a hearing issue?

SPEAKER_06 25:39

A developmental issue.

SPEAKER_03 25:40

A developmental issue. And I said, get lost, we're changing scores. I was 200% convinced. No, I know she's listening, I know she's understanding, she's going through a change from one language to another. Don't tell me, don't tell me for a second, and it's your fault problem, not mine. If you think she's got a developmental issue, she hasn't. And we took the lessons to another school, she flourished, of course.

SPEAKER_06 26:04

A doctor, a pediatrician, said to us, you know, you have to choose to speak only one language at home, which I think is a mistake now.

SPEAKER_03 26:13

I do so.

SPEAKER_06 26:14

But it that at the time they told us, you know, this child needs to be spoken only in one language, and so from then that moment on, we always spoke English at home.

SPEAKER_00 26:27

And what about Rebecca? What was she like? Was he similar to her sisters?

SPEAKER_03 26:32

No, no, if you knew the third one, she's gong ho from the beginning, from Taiwan.

SPEAKER_06 26:39

Rebecca is so empathetic, so I mean, my grandmother when she used to come and visit, my grandmother would say, 'Cause my grandmother didn't speak any English, and at the time Rebecca didn't speak any Spanish, but they understood each other because Rebecca was like watching her and she knew what my grandmother needed before my grandmother said anything.

SPEAKER_03 27:04

Um Rebecca was born in Dublin.

SPEAKER_06 27:07

Um when she was two months old, we went back to England.

SPEAKER_03 27:10

And when she was only two months old, we went back to England.

SPEAKER_06 27:12

And then when she was two and a half years old, we went to America.

SPEAKER_00 27:17

Going to America felt like a dream, something that they had hoped for their family, and certainly was going to be helpful in their careers. But as Jared will tell you, it was a lot about the kids still. And their relationship wasn't always at the forefront of these years.

SPEAKER_03 27:35

But all that time for us in our relationship, it was a long period where you become absorbed in the kids. And you know, we shared that, so we both kind of in a way enjoyed it. I mean, there was this sort of obviously struggles, you know, when you have to get up in the middle of the night and you do this. But I think we both genuinely enjoyed that experience.

SPEAKER_06 27:55

So we always went on holidays.

SPEAKER_03 27:57

We always went on holidays with the kids and we took them everywhere. We always took them abroad, but we would get fully involved in the whole process of their education, their vocations, everything. So we uh we sort of built it around that. And it, you know, sometimes you push your arm relationship uh off to the side while you're doing all this for the kids for years, and then later on you sort of get back together and think, oh, what are we gonna do now? Because they've all gone.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

Maria Theresa, if you haven't already figured out, is a go-getter kind of woman. Leaving Peru to go study French in France, leaving France and her love to go back to Peru, to come back to the UK for love. So when she went back to work after childbirth, I asked her if she felt any of the mom guilt other working women sometimes vocalize.

SPEAKER_06 28:53

Rebecca started uh school and I went back to work, so I felt that I had to do something. But I do remember my eldest child, Natalia, was 12 and a bit or something, 13, 14. And and I remember one day she said, Oh, pizza again? I do miss the smell of homemade food in this house.

SPEAKER_00 29:15

Jared, you must have felt outnumbered by all the women in your house.

SPEAKER_03 29:19

We had a male duck. Archie poor thing. No, I I didn't feel outnumbered. I kind of liked it. Uh my job was involved a lot of travel, so I was always on the road and out of the place and coming back. And I I used to try and come back as much as I could. And I remember Natalia at one stage saying to a friend of mine who did PR for me in New York, he said, What about your dad? He's always traveling there, you know, he's away a lot. How do you take it? And Natalia very wisely, which she was always wise beyond her years, Albert Mariana, he's always there when it counts. And it was like, thank you, Natalia, for letting me off the hook because a lot of the time I wasn't there when it counted. And I think probably the girls all felt that in different ways because I was there for long periods. I started traveling later on in my career, not at the beginning. So Natalia saw more of me as the home base. Vanessa would have seen me more with the traveling, and Rebecca, uh, yeah, with the travelling later on.

SPEAKER_06 30:23

But you always make sure that you were back for her soccer games.

SPEAKER_03 30:27

For everything, and for the girls, for whatever reason. I coached the girls' soccer team for 10 years. So I was there for games, like I could be in Argentina and you know, South America or Australia or Los Angeles and be back for gangs on Saturday.

SPEAKER_00 30:42

And then suddenly, 19 years after he promised to bring them back to Europe, 19 years after working his way up the corporate ladder and building the American dream, Jared got a job offer. And this was the opportunity Maria Teresa had been waiting for.

SPEAKER_06 31:01

When we were in our fifties, Jared got a job in Europe.

SPEAKER_00 31:05

Late fifties.

SPEAKER_06 31:06

Yeah, late fifties, late fifties, yes. Uh when he got the job in America, it was supposed to be for three years. And I said, three years, and then we go back. And he said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, we go back. But then when the when Push came to shove, he was offered a job in America. I wasn't happy. I didn't want to stay in America. I mean, I was born in America and I have an American passport, but I never felt at home there. But in the end, we stayed 19 years. I said to him, Well, where is the the company based? Madrid, Barcelona? And he said, No, it's funny enough, it's Palma de Mallorca. And I said, Oh, take it. No matter what the salary is, just take it. Because my own all that thing that I have been manifesting all these years, you know, that I wanted to be on a little house on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean. I all of a sudden that came back to me. I mean, everybody at home said to me, How can you do it? How can you move? You know, now after all these years, how can you do it? And I was, I was very, very happy.

SPEAKER_03 32:17

It's funny, we had the typical sort of American life. We had a very large house in New York, two and a bit acres, three cars, whatever, all the things that you sort of build up over the years in America, and we sort of snap, forget it. We gave everything away practically. I had shelves and shelves of books and pictures, and all of Vanessa's friends came and picked a place clean. Um we threw out just about everything that we had, and we came here with the bare minimum, uh, and we're happy with it.

SPEAKER_06 32:47

It was like a a kind of a cleansing thing. And when I arrived here, I was so happy, wasn't I?

SPEAKER_03 32:54

I am so happy here too, compared to America. Which really brings us back to ourselves, that you, you know, you have your early stage of romantic relationship and everything's hunky-dory, and then you have the kids that just absorb years without counting. Um then you come back to, well, there's only me and you know.

SPEAKER_06 33:12

And the dog at the time.

SPEAKER_03 33:14

Oh, the dog at the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She wouldn't have come off the dog. If the dog should have come with the dog and left me behind.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

I can't blame her. I think my dog will probably be the first thing I pack when we get ready to move to Europe. But I will say it is really refreshing to hear a couple talk about this stage in life, the almost retirement stage, the stage at when all of the dreams that you dreamed for yourself are mostly behind you. But that doesn't stop these two from still dreaming.

SPEAKER_03 33:48

Your relationship as well, over the years sort of waxes, wanes, matures, you know, improves, declines, does all those things through the the time of your lifestyle. But from the beginning, I mean, since I guess I wrote the letter saying, you know, come back, I can't live with Edge. I guess that's still there. Uh what I'd say was um you miss opportunities to manifest that. And you get, you know, tied up with your kids and you don't say those things anymore. The things you say at the beginning, you stop saying them. And then and and you get to a stage where you sort of go, Well, I wish I'd said that more, or I wish I'd said it some other time. Or that is what I think to me comes back to me now, sort of going, it's a shame I didn't say that more.

SPEAKER_06 34:34

When I decided to go back to college um in 2016, um, I decided to study English because I thought it would be easier for me to study English, you know. And um and we've always had this love of languages. So when I started going to college and he was not very much involved because he was still working, but then he retired, but he was still not that much involved. But then the COVID came and I had to study from home, and he got so involved and so interested that in the end it was him that was taking the classes, and I was like lying there on the s on the uh terrace taking the sun because I couldn't stand it so boring.

SPEAKER_03 35:22

And I'm the one who sort of as best I can looks after the house now.

SPEAKER_06 35:25

Oh, yeah, well, because it started when I went back to university, right? And so very lucky that when he I came back home, the meal was cooked, and then he did all the shopping. And but he enjoyed doing all the shopping. He had all these ladies in the market, you know, that call him king, the because they call you king here.

SPEAKER_03 35:46

They call women Reina. Here they'll they'll address the market as Rey, and the women they'll call Reina.

SPEAKER_06 35:53

Reina.

SPEAKER_03 35:54

It's a Mallorcan thing.

SPEAKER_06 35:55

Oh La Rey, I don't know. And you know he was his favorite, his favorite ladies that he would go and buy stuff from and I but it's kind of a way of payback, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03 36:06

I mean, I must have for years when I was traveling, she was doing uh heavy lifting. Isn't it time I did some of the heavy lifting?

SPEAKER_06 36:13

I I went through a bad patch when I couldn't walk. I had um arthritis on both my hips, so I was like really, really handicapped. He was really doing the heavy lifting because I just couldn't, you know. So now I'm okay because I I had uh both my hips replaced.

SPEAKER_03 36:33

She still doesn't do the cooking.

SPEAKER_06 36:36

But now I can actually pick up the plates and take them to the kitchen.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

I really love the way that he still makes her laugh after all these years. They still got it, and also the way they take care of each other. It's a good reminder that life goes fast, so cherish the ones you love.

SPEAKER_06 36:56

Even though we didn't get married in the church, you know, through sickness and through health, right?

SPEAKER_03 37:05

The church has no has no sort of um uh no sort of ownership of those concepts, in my view.

SPEAKER_00 37:13

Well said, I think I share that view. And so I asked them some final questions, ones you'll hear me ask throughout the entirety of this series about what love has taught them that you have to be patient, that you have to look past problems because you have something together that you have built together, a history that you have built that nobody's going to take away.

SPEAKER_06 37:47

That's what keeps you together.

SPEAKER_03 37:51

I I would say that it it's something that you you can't ignore in your own soul. That it's there, and once you know it's there, it's blind. You you just have to keep as best you can nurturing it at different stages of your your life in your relationship.

SPEAKER_06 38:12

Even though sometimes you forget and you perhaps don't pay a attention as much attention as you should to the other person. Deep down, you know, the love is there. I mean maybe you are distracted with with stuff, but the love is still there.

SPEAKER_00 38:33

What do you love about the other person?

SPEAKER_06 38:36

His intelligence. I fell in love with how intelligent he is, it's still true now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 38:43

I love her ability to empathize with other people, to understand and care for other people. Um selflessly. So that more than basically what I feel is every time she walks in the room, I just stand up and applaud.

SPEAKER_00 39:05

You've been listening to The Love Department, hosted by Nick Lockhart. The Love Department is produced in Brooklyn, New York. Special thanks to producer Karen Mento and sound engineer Bree Sealy. Our theme song is Love by Adam Baldwin. Please stay in touch with us. You can reach out to the show on the Heartline by visiting our website at www.lovartment.com. For exclusive written content, subscribe to our Substack for just $5 a month. There's a really great article titled The Invisible Work about who really does the heavy lifting around the home. And while you're here, leave us a review and subscribe to this podcast. Okay, you remember what we talked about at the beginning. Now, hand to heart for the fore count. I wish you love, love.