My Yugoslav Grandparents, Married For 50 Years, Having Lunch On A Sunday Afternoon. Here Is Their Story.

As a kid, like most girls and boys living in fairytales, I always imagined having this ‘until death tear us apart’ kind of love that will last forever. Utopian a bit – we all lived that through, right?

But as time passed and years went by I realised that it took more than a ‘I do’ in the local Church to make things work. It took even more than love.

People around me were getting married, obviously loving each other, throwing parties, having babies… but also filing divorces relatively quickly.

Couples seemed to have expiry date. Like cheese or eggs.

Couples in general, except this one.

Mr. and Mrs. Janic spent HALF OF A CENTURY together.

They met on a early morning train somewhere in the Balkans in the late 60s on their way to work. Well, he was working – she was still in school.

Couple weeks later after their first meeting, Mila and Radoljub felt the butterflies which resulted in a secret marriage: they naturally ran away to fulfil their inner calls and say the famous ‘I do’. It was an urgent call, obviously.

However, they respectively got kicked out from their homes for the ‘faux pas’ and the-sealing-the-deal-with-the-wrong-person (half a century later, it turns out that the families were wrong. The whole story turned out to be more than all right).

Having nowhere to go,they immigrated to Paris as Haute Couture tailors without any basic knowledge of French, lived through May ’68, watched Apollo 11 landing on a small black and white TV screen, watched their country burn down to ashes (politically, culturally) after Tito’s death while being miles and miles away…

…and they made it all through.

I asked them if it was love that kept them glued together.

In the kitchen, while boiling water for two cups of Turkish coffee, my grandma slowly whispered to my ear:

”Marriage is like a big jar. On top you have honey, and right beneath you have dirt. In the first years of marriage, you’re young, naive, so you really enjoy eating the sweet honey on top. But later on, it becomes bitter and only dirt remains. So, you either throw the jar with the dirt, either you continue eating it and keeping it because it’s your favorite one so far.”

…and everything made sense in my head after that.

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