Patience, commitment are their virtues
February 1, 2009 by crystalabbegraham
Web Extra by Chris Graham
They met as college freshmen, but it took 10 years for Dean Welty to ask Janet to marry him.
“I had to work on him,” Janet said, playfully nudging Dean, her husband of 38 years now.
“I had to get over my gunshyness,” Dean said.
Thirty-eight years and two children have justified Janet’s patience. But it hasn’t always been easy.
“We’re all vulnerable. At any age you can be vulnerable. So it’s a daily exercise to remain committed,” said Janet, a pregnancy counselor in Harrisonburg in her spare time, who had to bear the bulk of the responsibility for the family with Dean working long hours in the Foreign Service for 26 years before retiring a decade ago.
“You have tough times, but you work through them together,” said Dean, now the head of the Valley Family Forum, a social-conservative organization that among other things promotes a traditional view of marriage as the foundation of American society.
“There is a concept that I was just looking at. It’s a verse in Eccleisastes. Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow one. That’s a marriage,” Dean said. “When she’s down, I’m there to help her. When I’m down, she’s there to help me.”
Every year is better than the one before, both agreed. “I don’t know about every day, because you have your ups and downs, just like with everything else. But in the cumulative review of it, every year is better than the one before,” Dean said.
Janet admits to having some slight concerns when Dean was getting ready for retirement. “One of the ladies in the State Department said, I need to warn you. When you retire, two is one too many in the kitchen,” Janet said. “She was talking about constantly being together. We had to work through – I had to adjust to the fact that I didn’t have the house to myself, and that he was here and had some things that he needed to say or rearrange. It is different when you’re together all the time,” Janet said.
Dean smiled at that story.
“I don’t know what I’d be like without Janet by my side. Because you become so intertwined with each other. You almost lose sight of what is you anymore and what is her. Like two trees just growing together,” Dean said.
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