A Miami husband and wife who recently attained the title of world’s longest-married couple say they managed that feat just by loving one another.
“We love each other,” Eleanor Gittens, 107, said to LongeviQuest when the website specializing on people who are in their second century of life asked what was the secret to her 83 years of marriage to her husband, Lyle.
Meanwhile, 108-year-old Lyle Gittens’s reply to that question was: “I love my wife.”
The Gittenses’ heartwarming remarks about each other came as LongeviQuest’s global validation commission used the pair’s 1942 marriage certificate, US census entries and cross-referenced archival material spanning decades to confirm they are the longest-married couple in the world.
A 4 November news article from LongeviQuest said the Gittenses assumed that title after the death in October of Brazil’s Manoel Angelim Dino. Dino, 106, and his wife of 85 years – Maria de Sousa Dino, 102 – had been LongeviQuest’s longest-married couple in the world since February.
The surviving photo of Eleanor and Lyle Gittens’ wedding in Bradenton, Florida in 1942. Photograph: LongeviQuest
The Gittenses are the world’s oldest ever married couple, too, with a combined age of more than 216, said LongeviQuest’s article, which posited that the pair’s love story is exceptional for having survived war and other hardships.
Lyle and Eleanor Gittens first met in 1941 at a college basketball game that he played in for Clark Atlanta University and which she attended as a spectator. Eleanor told LongeviQuest that she couldn’t remember whether Clark Atlanta or the historically Black university’s crosstown rival Morehouse College won. All she remembered, she said, was that it was the first time she met Lyle, who was later inducted into the men’s basketball hall of fame at Clark Atlanta.
The two went on to fall in love and plan to marry despite being certain Lyle would be drafted into the military because of the second world war. They wed on 4 June 1942 after Lyle was granted a three-day pass from training at a US army base in Georgia.
His wedding day was the first time Lyle met Eleanor’s family. He recalled to LongeviQuest that he had to ride to his bride in a racially segregated train car – a long trip before the dawn of the US civil rights era that Lyle said was well worth it because of Eleanor.
Eleanor and Lyle Gittens, world’s longest-married couple, holding hands. Photograph: LongeviQuest
When Lyle left to serve in Italy with the US army’s 92nd infantry division, Eleanor couldn’t help but wonder if she would ever see him again alive, she previously told Florida’s Westside Gazette. She was already pregnant with the first of their three children, and she moved to New York City, where she met her husband’s family for the first time.
Eleanor supported their family doing payroll for an aircraft parts producer while she and Lyle stayed connected through a series of letters. The military censored the letters so heavily that more of Lyle’s words were redacted than visible, as Eleanor recalled to LongeviQuest.
Eleanor and Lyle at last started building their life together after the war, settling in New York. They passed New York’s civil service exam together, pursued careers in government work and traveled, including to Eleanor’s favorite locale: Guadeloupe in the Caribbean.
She was 69 when she earned an urban education doctorate from Fordham University in the Bronx. The pair also spent decades as active members of Clark Atlanta’s alumni association before eventually moving to Miami to be close to their daughter, Angela.
Lyle said he misses New York, and he acknowledged that he couldn’t quite believe his marriage to Eleanor was record-setting. But he said he is delighted to remain at Eleanor’s side.
“I’m happy to be here,” Lyle told LongeviQuest in a video published on the organization’s YouTube page. “We enjoy our time together … [and] we’ve done a lot of things together.”
