{"id":19773,"date":"2018-02-08T11:05:49","date_gmt":"2018-02-08T16:05:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=19773"},"modified":"2018-02-14T15:47:10","modified_gmt":"2018-02-14T20:47:10","slug":"the-long-and-winding-road-to-lasting-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/the-long-and-winding-road-to-lasting-love\/","title":{"rendered":"The long and winding road to lasting love"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cOh, god,\u201d says Marie Barnes.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s a long and complicated story,\u201d adds husband Gordon.
\nIt seems like a simple enough question, but \u201cHow long have you been married?\u201d turned out to be anything but. From the kitchen of their Catherine Avenue home, Gordon Barnes produces a scroll. Laying it out on the floor, weighing it down flat on the hardwood, he unfurls it.
\nIt\u2019s their story, laid out on a roll of paper no less than three metres in length.
\nIt charts the Aurora couple\u2019s personal milestones against the milestones marked by the world at large \u2013 for better or worse \u2013 and still has an extra metre or two left to fill in.
\nBut the chart itself is really only a thumbnail of their story; the look they exchange tells enough to render my original question inconsequential.
\n\u201cMarie likes to say she\u2019s glad she got her Gordons in the right order,\u201d says Mr. Barnes, pausing about a third of the way up Marie\u2019s side of the chart when she entered her first marriage to Gordon Aiken who, for much of their marriage, served as MP for Parry-Sound Muskoka.
\nMarie readily agrees: \u201cIt\u2019s a good record.\u201d
\nGordon, 85, and Marie, 91, have been together for over 50 years, nearly 30 years of which have been spent as man and wife.
\nOver those 50 years they say they have never actually had a fight. Theirs is a union, they say, bound not only by love but a shared inquisitiveness, a thirst for knowledge \u2013 science and history \u2013 which they agree is \u201cmuch more interesting, more titillating\u201d than \u201csomebody\u2019s fiction.\u201d
\nIt\u2019s a relationship that was forged by a shared love of the arts \u2013 Marie\u2019s creative passion lies in textile art while Gordon\u2019s is in ceramics and pottery \u2013 which brought them together all those many years ago.
\n\u201cIt just happened,\u201d says Marie. \u201cThere was just never any doubt. I knew he would never let me down.\u201d
\nTheir paths intersected in the 1960s at the Ontario Craft Foundation (OCF) where Gordon was eventually tasked with the day-to-day operations of the group. But, Marie, as it happened, was a member of the Foundation\u2019s 12-person Board.
\n\u201cShe was my boss,\u201d says Gordon, then a happy bachelor, with a certain degree of pride, to which Marie responds with a twinkle.
\nBut their paths started in very different areas.
\nMarie\u2019s chart began in Alberta in 1926, born to a family with Danish roots. Her father was a butter maker from Denmark who came to the prairies to make his fortune running creameries.
\nAfter studying at the Vancouver School of Art, she married the first Gordon and started a family. They settled in Bracebridge where Marie\u2019s art largely took a back seat to her role as a mother and political wife.
\nGordon\u2019s side of the scroll, meanwhile, begins in Minnesota in 1933 \u2013 \u201cI came in with Adolf Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt,\u201d he says with a chuckle \u2013 where he grew up on a 120 acre cattle farm.
\nAfter his primary education in a one-room schoolhouse, the family moved to a larger community and Gordon got his feet wet as a photographer for the high school newspaper and yearbook, work which eventually landed him a journalism scholarship.
\nHis education continued at St. Olaf College and the University of Minnesota where he decided to enlist in the army before the G.I. Bill was fully repealed.
\n\u201cThere were a lot of us that became patriotic in December 1954 and January 1955,\u201d he says.
\nEventually, with a focus on education and the arts, Gordon landed in Canada where he not only took up his artistic endeavours in earnest but worked in a number of educational posts, including a long-time stint at Seneca College\u2019s King Campus.
\nBy this time, their artistic paths had finally crossed.
\nArtistically, they were a force to be reckoned with and, in their craft world, they literally took the world by storm. Marie says their involvement with the OCF turned into a \u201ctrip around the world\u201d taking them just about everywhere with a flourishing craft movement, from Peru, to Japan, to Ireland.
\n\u201cWe started to get friendlier as the marriage had crumbled back here,\u201d says Gordon of their trip to South America. \u201cWe were together in Peru, but we were together-together two years later in Dublin.\u201d
\nLove flourished as they subsequently toured England, indulging Marie\u2019s passion for ecclesiastical embroideries and there was no turning back.
\n\u201cWe had been living in sin,\u201d says Marie, of how their relationship progressed.
\nOn marriage, Gordon says, \u201cWe basically said, why bother?\u201d
\n\u201cIt didn\u2019t seem important. It wasn\u2019t on our list,\u201d says Marie.
\n \u201cAnd there\u2019s always other options!\u201d Gordon adds with a three-part duck, cover and grin.
\nMarriage made its way onto the list, however, in 1989 when both were employed by Seneca\u2019s College of Applied Arts & Technology and the powers-that-be pointed out that, if married before the time of retirement, one\u2019s spouse would receive half of the other\u2019s pension in widowhood.
\n\u201cMarie came back that night and said, \u2018I think we might have to get married,\u2019\u201d recalls Gordon. \u201cAnd I said, \u2018You\u2019re sixty-what?\u201d
\nPerhaps it wasn\u2019t the most romantic reason to lock this relationship down, but it\u2019s a relationship that has endured.
\nWhen asked the secret to a long and happy relationship, Gordon offers a tip on what not to do, by cupping his hands into an imaginary smart phone, furiously typing with his thumbs.
\n\u201cTalk and communicate \u2013 that\u2019s the secret,\u201d he says, looping back to their proud claim of never having had a fight over the past fifty years. \u201cWhenever there is an issue, let\u2019s be rational about this. What is the issue? What is the worst possible thing that could happen? What\u2019s Plan B, if that is the case?\u201d
\n\u201cWe work it out,\u201d adds Marie. \u201cI can\u2019t remember a situation where it didn\u2019t seem logical to proceed through it. Dam the torpedoes and full speed ahead.\u201d
\nAnother one of Marie\u2019s pro-tips is to \u201cdevelop wide friendships and sincere friendships with a lot of people\u201d and both agree on the importance of having varied interests as well.
\n\u201cThere has to be a willingness to let the other person pursue that interest,\u201d says Gordon. \u201cNeither one of you own the other.\u201d
\nAdds Marie: \u201cI\u2019ve never had to ask permission.\u201d
\n\u201cWe now observe that it is a span of 50 years since we first met,\u201d says Gordon, finally answering the initial question. \u201cAt 91 and 85, I think we can carry on.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir \u201cOh, god,\u201d says Marie Barnes. \u201cIt\u2019s a long and complicated story,\u201d adds husband Gordon. It seems like a simple enough question, but \u201cHow long have you been married?\u201d turned out to be anything but. From the kitchen of their Catherine Avenue home, Gordon Barnes produces a scroll. Laying it out on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19765,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/2018-02-08-06.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-58V","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-11 16:42:25","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19773\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}