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Love is ‘Golden’
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
By Susan Harrison Wolffis
CHRONICLE STAFF WRITER
A year ago, Freddy and Dee Golden were splitting up, saying goodbye to one another and 12 years of marriage.
Some Valentine’s Day story.
But then, as love stories go, Freddy and Dee’s has always been a little short on conventional romance — and heavy on the grit of life.
“We both brought a lot of trash and garbage into our marriage … and it hangs right on you like a chain and ball,” Freddy says.
Sometimes love gets the best of you, though, despite the odds.
On March 19, 1994, the Goldens entered into marriage certifiably smitten with one another, but with wounded hearts and personal histories of divorce and disastrous previous relationships.
“Sometimes you wonder. You wonder how you can even go on,” Dee says.
A year ago, she couldn’t. After 12 years of marriage, Dee finally called it quits. She divorced Freddy, even though he says from the first mention of divorce he didn’t want to lose her or end their marriage or give up on their relationship.
“I wasn’t happy,” she confesses. “I tried to talk to him, but he wasn’t listening.”
Because this is not your typical love story, Freddy says he had to go along with the divorce before he could begin to woo her back.
“I knew things would work out in the end,” Freddy says. “I always knew it.”
He is a man of great faith, he says, but that part of the story — faith in God — comes a little later, along with an ending worthy of St. Valentine.
“It’s OK to do a love story,” Freddy cautions, “but let’s give credit where credit is due. Let’s make this a testimony to God.”
But first …
About a year ago, Dee, 60, met someone online, a man from Muskegon who promised her “greener pastures” if she’d divorce Freddy, 58, and move from their home in Corinth, N.Y.
Freddy warned Dee she wasn’t making the right choices. He even resorted to hauling out old movies of grandchildren to tug at her emotional heartstrings to keep her home, “but I purposely closed my mind,” Dee says.
Their divorce, which went uncontested, was final on March 1, 2006, just a few weeks short of their 12th wedding anniversary.
Within days of moving to Muskegon and taking out a year’s lease on a mobile home, Dee says “everything Freddy said came to pass.” The grass wasn’t any greener here than it was back in Corinth.
“I felt like such a jerk,” Dee says. “What was I thinking?”
Back home in Corinth, Freddy never once said, “I told you so.”
“I wasn’t bitter,” he says. “I went through this once before. … I just wanted to focus on her and put our marriage together.”
He called Dee sometimes up to a half-dozen times a day, just to talk, just to see how she was. Once he even called her from a 6.5-acre plot they own in the country, land they always said they’d build on someday.
“He said everywhere he looked, he saw me. It brought tears to my eyes,” Dee says.
Finally in July, Freddy packed up his truck, including a new puppy he knew she’d love, and drove straight through to Muskegon to pick her up and take her home.
“Three states later, I was here,” he says.
But Dee was in a financial pinch in Muskegon. On disability and a fixed income, she didn’t want to forfeit the money she’d lose if she broke her year’s lease — so Freddy decided to stay. He tendered his resignation at work in Corinth to be with the woman he intended to have a “happily-ever-after life.”
But first, they had to confront the past that had split them apart.
Early in their marriage, Freddy had to overcome a battle with the bottle.
For her part, Dee has had to learn to trust men again, more than once. After her first marriage to a high school sweetheart ended because of physical abuse, she fell in love and got pregnant — “at the age of 35, you’d think I’d know better,” she says — only to have the father of the baby disappear.
“I’ll be honest, I guess I thought ‘happy ever after’ was a fantasy,” Dee says.
But one night in 1994, Dee met Freddy in a bar at a Halloween party for which she was the designated driver. She remembers thinking conversation with him was easy. Time flew when she and Freddy were in one another’s presence. She “looked past” Freddy’s waist-length beard and hair “and straight into his heart,” she says.
For his part, Freddy didn’t condemn her when he learned she was raising a 12-year-old daughter, born out-of-wedlock, on her own.
“She made it through my ‘four-minute rule.’ I can tell in the first four minutes how people are, and I liked her,” Freddy says, winking at her as if they still were dating.
Romance aside, they say, more than anything, it was time. Time to be married. Dee was 48 when they met and Freddy two years her junior. They were tired of the lives they were leading alone.
“All I did was eat, sleep and work,” Dee remembers. “I felt it was time to have a life … a family life.”
After a five-month courtship, Freddy and Dee said their “I do’s” in front of a justice of the peace in the living room of the mobile home they shared in Corinth, N.Y., in front of her four children and his two — and set up housekeeping.
“We did it our way, not God’s way,” she says.
The honeymoon lasted three, maybe four, years.
Dee worked swing shift at a paper mill in town. Freddy, who can fix anything and works harder than men twice his size, always had a job, whether it was on his own or working for a contractor. When he was laid off during the harsh winter months, he reveled in the stay-at-home husband and dad role.
“It gave me a chance to make up for some of what I lost with my own kids,” he says.
But then his drinking got to be a problem. It escalated to the point that he was arrested in 1998.
Freddy stopped drinking on the spot; anything to make things right with Dee, he says.
But there was a wedge in their relationship they couldn’t hurdle. It intensified when one of Freddy’s sons and his family moved in — with no departure date in sight. Freddy was financially supporting everyone in the house, and there was friction between Dee and him.
One thing led to another, and a year ago, Dee left.
Here in Muskegon, they started to get to know each other again.
“Freddy traveled three states to get me back,” Dee says. “What man would do that if he didn’t love me? He’s shown me in more ways than one that he wants me. Actions do speaker louder than words.”
Freddy glances at the woman he loves, shrugs his shoulders in a gesture that says “but of course” and winks at her.
What does he love most about Dee?
“That’s an easy question to answer,” he says quickly. “She’s the strength of my weakness.”
No commercial Valentine could be as sweet.
After a few weeks of being reunited, Freddy and Dee found their way to Parkside Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Roosevelt Park where they confided to Pastor Don Kakavecos that they were trying to put their marriage back together and sought counseling.
“I really sensed in them the desire to make things right,” Kakavecos says. “It’s not always easy to reconcile, but that really pleases God.”
Kakavecos told the couple he didn’t feel qualified as a marriage counselor and referred them to Bridge to Life, a ministry in North Muskegon that helps couples rebuild and restore marriages.
Freddy and Dee embraced the idea, and during the 12-week course, Freddy concocted a plan on the final night of class to ask Dee to re-marry him. It caught her off-guard, but the answer was yes.
“This is what we’d wish for everyone,” the pastor says.
On Jan. 28, with the help of the church, Bridge to Life and even Muskegon Rescue Mission where Freddy and Dee found new clothes at the thrift shop, the Goldens exchanged wedding vows and renewed their commitment to one another during Sunday worship service.
“Freddy says he still considers March 29 our anniversary, though,” she says.
And how’s their marriage the second time around?
“We laugh more. We have more fun,” Dee says. “He’s been my soulmate all along.”
Her lease runs out in May, and at this point, it’s anybody’s guess if Freddy and Dee will return to New York or stay in Muskegon where “we really feel like we belong,” she says.
“God got us here and to our church and to Bridge to Life,” Freddy says. “He’ll let us know if we’re supposed to be here. We want to give others hope … hope for everlasting marriages like ours.”