Defying time, age and odds: Canadians share their love stories on Valentine’s Day
Global News
On the day of love, Canadians across the nation have shared their unusual stories of love, marriage and hardships with Global News.
Valentine’s Day is the day of love and this year, Canadians across the nation are sharing their unusual stories of love, marriage and overcoming hardships with Global News after tumultuous recent years.
Four couples, whose relationships span the decades and numerous challenges from age to cancer to distance, and everything in between, share how their love has stood the tests of time and roadblocks, starting all the way back in the 1940s.
Marlene O’Donnell and Paul La Duke were high school sweethearts, around 14 and 16 years of age.
Their relationship was deemed “too serious” by O’Donnell’s father and they were split up. Eventually, each went on to marry other people.
O’Donnell married La Duke’s friend from high school and he married a woman he met in college. Both had children with their partners.
Years passed and “things did not end as happily as they began” for the two marriages and the spouses of O’Donnell and La Duke passed away.
They thought they “were going to be alone for the rest of our lives,” La Duke, now 75, told Global News from Wiarton, Ontario.
The thought of such loneliness led to their first date in 56 years at a restaurant in St. Thomas, Ontario, three years ago.