Longtime Valentines

Karen and Geoffrey Doubleday of the Lake Mohawk area of Sparta were together for 12 years before they tied the knot 31 years ago in March.

Question: How did you guys meet?

Karen: I was working for a hotel chain, Prime Motor Inns, at the time and the woman who was my manager said, ‘Oh, you’re so much like my daughter. You should meet. You guys would get along great.’ So we finally did. I met Karen and she was going out with Geoff. So, we became friends and then they parted as friends and Geoff started to pursue me.

Geoff: This other Karen had a party that she was at and me and my friend showed up at this party. She came running out in a really cool hippie dress, long ponytails and everything. (She) jumped up and gave me a big hug, said hi and then ran back off behind the house to the party. It’s like wow. And even Dave, my friend, said after she ran away. ‘Wow, who was that?’ I didn’t know.

(both laugh)

Geoff: I think that was kind of where it really started and then, yeah, I was following her around pretty much until she agreed to go out with me. We finally got married after 12 years dating.

Q: (joking) What took you guys so long?

Karen: We were young. We were just young. Neither one of us were ready to settle down forever and I knew once I got married, it was going to be for good.

Geoff: Plus, I was going to school when we started ...

Karen: and traveling.

Geoff: Dating and then traveled all over the world for five years. I was a field service tech, so I wasn’t home all that much really. On weekends generally, and that was it. So, we were not ready to settle down.

Karen: For sure, we wouldn’t have lasted if we ever settled.

Geoff: Well, that wouldn’t have worked well. I wasn’t over here. Yeah, but we stuck together anyway.

Q: Who controls the TV remote?

Geoff: That’s debatable. (laughing)

Karen: You hide it, but when I need it or it’s like, ‘Where’s the remote?’ He hands it over.

Geoff: Yeah, I don’t hide it. But I do take possession initially. But I give it up willingly and freely.

Karen: Most of the time, yeah.

Geoff: I suppose it depends on what you want to do.

Q: How did you guys end up in Sparta?

Karen: I’m from Upper Montclair originally. Geoff’s from Wayne and Pines Lake community. So we used to go out in your car for drives.

Geoff: Yeah, we used to go for drives all over North Jersey, you know. And I had a little Fiat convertible two-seater so in the summer we just go out for drives and wander all around, get lost and ...

Karen: I hated getting lost.

Geoff: Often would end up in this area just by chance.

Karen: It was funny because whenever I’d say, ‘Where are we? Do you know where we are? This was before GPS. And then suddenly, we’d come down I’d see the Lake Mohawk sign. For some reason it was comforting to me. I never knew we were going to live here.

Geoff: But we were looking after our first son was born. He was just months old when we were looking for a house and a couple of years before that I guess one of our friends got married in Lake Mohawk at the country club here so we’re familiar with that.

Plus, I grew up in a lake community myself and really wanted to be able to have that for our kids. This was the best of them all.

Karen: Then after we moved in, my dad passed away. My stepmother had I heard that my dad used to love to come and sit on the boardwalk. Never knew that.

Geoff: We’ve been here over 28 years.

Q: Tell me about your wedding day. What is your favorite memory from that day?

Geoff: Standing up in the limo with champagne through the sunroof on the way to the reception.

Karen: We had a very small wedding at St. Ann’s in Parsippany. And one of his cousins is a priest. So he married us. And that was so much fun, but it was very small. It was just immediate family.

Geoff: Like 30 people in the reception.

Karen: And then we went to the Paris Inn in Wayne.

Geoff: And had a nice big dinner and celebration with everybody.

Karen: We were never into the big formal wedding.

Geoff: It was hard to have a small wedding because I had the 12 cousins. Some of them were married with kids and everything also. So it was how many of them can you bring? Just brought my aunt and uncle. That was a bit of a controversy, but it worked out.

Q: How do you not kill each other when conflict inevitably arises?

Geoff: It depends on who’s right. (laughs)

Karen: Oh my gosh, yeah. Geoff’s a patient person.

Geoff: It’s always typical little things, you know. Rarely anything serious has ever come up that that we had a problem with. We just kind of gravitate away from each other for a little.

Karen: But you know, we’ll come back later and meet for a Manhattan.

Geoff: It’s a Doubleday cocktail, helps to just cool things down if ever we need to.

Q: What are you most proud of in the past 30-plus years?

Karen: Our boys, Geoffrey and Christian. They make everything worthwhile. And just that, honestly, we’re still together. We’re living a life that we enjoy, you know.

Geoff: Yeah, being together this long and having the community. I think we did a pretty good job of finding a place to raise a family and making it all the way through. (Our) kids are 28 and almost 25 now, and they’re doing their things. It worked out well. We have a good community here with a lot of friends.

Karen: Big music community.

Geoff: Huge music community.

Karen: Yeah, yeah music’s important in our family. Very important.

Q: What advice would you give young couples today?

Karen: I would say, Don’t rush into anything. Just make sure it’s really what you want. You know if you’re in love but also to have a good friendship.

Geoff: For sure. Along with someone you love, it just works out. You don’t just love them, but they’re also your best friend

Karen: And everybody’s different. So, you have to find that compatibility of all those little things. Understand what you’re getting into completely. (You) can’t change people. You don’t want to go in thinking, ‘Oh well, I can make this better. I can make that better.’ We are who are. If it works it, it works.

Geoff: Marry your best friend. And don’t go into it thinking you’re going to change them because that’s true, you don’t change anybody. You are who you are.

Q: What is it about the other person that you love the most? How do you think that has helped your relationship last the past 43 years?

Karen: Geoff is very easy-going with a lot of patience and I think that’s helped. Patience is important. Be patient and kind.

Geoff: She is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met in my life. Incredible sense of humor and great sarcasm. It just makes every day fun. You never know what you’re going to get. Also, everybody’s attracted to her as a friend, and she’s got a close circle of friends. People always want to hang out with herg. She makes everyone laugh.

Karen: Thanks, Geoff.

Geoff: The laughter is just, you know, that’s an enduring thing. It makes you healthier. It’s good to laugh as much as you can so you can’t breathe. And that happens often. And then having the circle of close friends that’s always growing and always changing.

Karen: Friends get you through, right?

Geoff: Yeah.

* * * * * * *

Married for 22 years and together for 32 years, Jose and Alyssandra Iudica of Sparta met when they were 15 at a high school dance. All these years later, they still stand strong.

Q: How did you guys meet?

Jose: We both grew up in Queens and I went to an all-boys school, Archbishop Molloy, and she went to an all-girls school, St. Agnes. So the boys school would always host dances for any girl that wanted to come. It was the fall of 1990.

Alyssandra: It’s like the first dance, maybe ‘91.

Jose: And right so I was friends with a kid that was next-door neighbors

Alyssandra: With my best friend.

Jose: Her best friend. And so we met at the dance. We didn’t immediately like try to get each other’s numbers or anything like that.

Alyssandra: No, his friend actually asked for my number. So I asked my friend to go out with him on a double date with us.

Jose: Just so we could end up on the same date and then we ended up dating each other and so we dated through high school. And yeah, we went to each other’s prom, but that’s how we met at a high school dance.

Q: Who controls the TV remote?

Alyssandra: He does. No question, I don’t even know what it looks like. I don’t even know where it is ever.

Jose: No, that’s true. We try to find shows that we both like. Except for the sports. She doesn’t like it.

Alyssandra: I like football.

Q: How do you not kill each other when conflict inevitably arises?

Jose: It depends on the kind of conflict.

Alyssandra: That’s what I was going to say.

.Jose: I mean, it helps that we know each other for so long, literally as kids..

Alyssandra: Yeah, I think we know how we’re gonna react.

Jose: There is sometimes conflict, I guess.

Alyssandra: It’s outside conflicts that comes in that we have to deal with together. If there’s an internal conflict, it’s usually resolved.

Jose: Pretty quickly, yeah. We kind of know each other. The buttons you don’t want to push.

Alyssandra: Yeah, very early on you learn what irks the other person.

Jose: You kind of have to be real with each other, like you can’t be fake around each other just because I’m like listen, I saw you when you were like 15. And I knew what you were, who you were, and she knew the same thing about me.

Alyssandra: You can’t really pretend.

Jose: Yeah, you can’t.

Alyssandra: Because the person knows already. Just by looking at him, I know what kind of mood he’s in, where he is, what page he’s on. It doesn’t even need to be a conversation a lot of the time. It’s just like, OK, we’ll look at it.

Q: What is your favorite memory from your marriage?

Jose: Paris.

Alyssandra: We took a trip with everybody: his parents ...

Jose: My mother, my brother, his kids.

Alyssandra: Our kids.

Jose: It was really, really, really nice because I like to travel and she was an attorney and it was hard for her to get (time) off. Now it’s a lot more flexible, but I was like, We’re going to go to Paris and I think we want to take everybody. I had a blast.

Alyssandra: I would say our 10th anniversary because I surprised you with our vow renewal. I’ve never been able to surprise him with anything because he reads me like a book and I somehow pulled off. I told him it was our oldest’s communion rehearsal and so we all got dressed up and I had the priest there in the church, and all of our wedding party and I forced him to marry me again.

Jose: I had no clue. Yeah, that was nice too.

Q: What advice would you give young couples today?

Alyssandra: What I see now is a lot of people don’t consider marriage a lifetime commitment. That it’s very easy to just walk away.

Jose: And sometimes it’s OK.

Alyssandra: And sometimes that’s OK. You know if you don’t want to put the time and effort in, but I don’t think people realize that it does take time and effort to know somebody and to construct the whole relationship that you want to last over time. I don’t think that people necessarily want to put that kind of time into anything. And sometimes they do, but they really have to know that from the beginning. When you’re going into a commitment like that, you have to know that it’s like not only a lifetime commitment, but it can be a lot of work. And then you add kids on top of it. They will change the whole dynamic of your relationship every single time you have another child. So yeah, just put the work in.

Jose: I agree. Maybe don’t rush into (it) like we obviously didn’t, but maybe not 10 years but definitely get to know the person because you know, it’s fun, it’s nice and at the beginning you’re in love. When it comes time, like you said, you don’t have any sleep because you have a newborn. You’re going to want to snap at the person next to you because you’re just touched out. Well, you gotta love that person. Some people just go into it liking the other person. But you have to love the person.

Alyssandra: We sound like old people, you realize that.

Q: What are you most proud of in your relationship over the past 32 years?

Alyssandra: Our kids.

Jose: Yeah, we did a good job. And also honestly I’m proud of the fact that we still love each other. I mean, it sounds cheesy, but a lot of people like after 32 years ...

Alyssandra: They tolerate each other.

Jose: We love each other and we literally want to hang out together.

Q: What is it about the other person that you love the most? How do you think that has helped your relationship last?

Jose: I think what attracted me to her the most was that she’s a good person. Her heart is really, really good. I think I was really intense. when I was a kid and she kind of is my home. She calms me down and I’m able to kind of be calm when I’m with her.

Alyssandra: OK, now this is going to sound funny. I think his strong quality is his intensity. And I’m not just saying this, but that’s what attracted me to him. And that’s what keeps me grounded is the fact that he always pushes me to where I need to be. I’m always the calm one and he’s always like, ‘Let’s go, let’s do this, let’s push forward.’ I feel like that’s why we complement each other because he’s the pioneer and I’m always the one that’s like, ‘Let’s just think about what we’re doing, let’s step back.’ I think that’s what makes us so great together.

Jose: The idea of complementing each other like almost being opposites in ways.

Alyssandra: There’s a lot to be said for opposites attract.