MICHELLE WILLARD, Post Content Editor
Posted: Sunday, February 14, 2010 7:12 am

After he followed her into her dorm, Margaret and Dalton Stroop married June 4, 1954.

St. Valentine’s Day is a day to celebrate love in all forms.

And these days it may seem like there isn’t much to celebrate with around half of all U.S. marriages ending in divorce.

But there are a chosen few that buck the trend, staying married for more than 50 years.

Dalton Stroop met his wife Margaret in the early 1950s when he was working for Middle Tennessee Electric Co-op and she was teaching music at David Lipscomb Elementary.

“We’d met before but hadn’t paid any attention to each other,” Margaret said. But then some mutual friends set them up on a blind date.

After their first date, Dalton dropped her off at her dormitory on Lipcomb’s Nashville campus.

“He followed me in. He wasn’t supposed to do that,” she said. “It impressed me I guess.”

The couple married a year later on June 4, 1954.

John Hood met his wife Marilyn at Central High School, but they didn’t start dating until after graduation, John said. In fact Marilyn doesn’t have a clear memory of when the couple first met.

“I really didn’t (know he was the one) until later on because I was dating somebody else at that time too,” Marilyn explained. “I would say it was several months later because I quit the other guy and you begin to think about things like that.”

John and Marilyn dated for a while before he saw their common interests and they were “very compatible.

“She was the one,” John said. They married Sept. 9, 1951.

But it wasn’t grand gestures or love, necessarily, that have kept these couples together for so long.

Long-lasting relationships aren’t built on something as fleeting as love. They are true partnerships between two people, but it does help if they like each other.

Margaret cited Dalton’s kindness, while Marilyn noted John’s outgoingness as reasons why the wives still like their husbands after 50 years.

“He never meets a stranger and remembers people too and that’s a really good thing about him,” Marilyn said about John.

The men were a little less romantic in their assessments of their wives. And although they were gruff and slightly uncomfortable with talking about their wives, they said the women’s supportiveness and friendliness, as well as the children they had together, were reasons why the marriages lasted.

“She’s been so supportive of anything and everything I’ve done,” John said, noting his years in the Army, working for both Samsonite and MTSU and years in the Tennessee House of Representatives.

“You couldn’t ask for a better person, good wife and great mother,” he added.

John also said their mutual interests, like the Evening Exchange Club, which works with families after children have been abused, have held the couple together over the years.

Even with friendliness, kindness and mutual interests, keeping a relationship going for can be tough.

Margaret said patience is an important trait for keeping a marriage alive and healthy.

“And determining to start with that this is a life partner,” she added. “As far as I’m concerned, I never thought about not staying married. Didn’t have any reason to either.”

Marilyn’s best advice is to “just close your eyes sometimes and keep your mouth shut. …There are times when you want to give up, but I tried to be supportive.”

John said his marriage to Marilyn has been a true partnership. Through all the ups and downs and in betweens, they supported each other and raised a family.

“I just never thought about anything else but that,” Marilyn said.

“When we married, I married for life and you just keep on keeping on.”

Michelle Willard can be reached at 615-869-0816 or at mwillard@murfreesboropost.com