Finding a Lifetime Partner in Ten Lessons
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The author and her husband Bill (Photo courtesy of Carolina Esguerra-Colborn)
I began life as a nerd. My IQ (intelligence quotient) developed, but my EQ (emotional quotient) stayed at zero. I had a good rationale: I was focused on getting out of the slums of Manila through a good education. Besides, I thought I was ugly, when all of a sudden, in UP, a smart engineering student took notice of me. He drove a car on campus and his family owned a taxi fleet. I could flag one anytime.
What luck! My goal could be achieved much faster. He took me to places I never thought I could ever be. Every day he picked me up and brought me home, took me to lunch, and walked me from class to class. My friends said his degree was BS in Carol Esguerra. When I started working, he continued the practice. Friends called him Jaworski. No other guy ever had the ghost of a chance.
Lesson Number 1: Give yourself the chance to make a proper choice.
A year after I graduated, he proposed with a dazzling one-carat diamond ring and matching half-carat earrings. My father was proud that his second daughter was marrying up. I had a lavish reception at a well-known restaurant unlike my older sister whose celebration was held at the guy’s small home. We had three kids in succession. After the second, he finally graduated from UP, after 15 years.
I was too smitten to notice that he did not have the drive. I began to worry about our future and worked harder. He turned to Roses, Lilies, and Daisies. After nine and a half years, I chose to become the stressed single parent most of you came to know, getting more degrees, acquiring more assets, and collecting more accolades. I left my children to the care of nannies, cooks, and drivers. It was a frenzied search for security. But it was a terribly lonely life.
Lesson Number 2: Don’t marry for the wrong reason.
The turning point happened when my sister Ellen, the actress, passed on from cancer in 2003. She had been estranged from her husband for years and her only daughter had died the year before, also of cancer. I didn’t want to die the same way. My three children already had careers of their own. In fact, two of them had left the nest to emigrate. I was ready to recast my own life.
I wanted time to cook a little, teach a little, travel a little, write a little, and, yes, “love a little.” The last one would have been impossible in Manila. I was lucky I was given an annulment practically for free when I became a high-ranking government official. Still, it seemed all the good ones had already been taken. All that remained were confirmed bachelors, philandering husbands, and closet queens. I decided to wind down my career early. I wanted to face the world with someone by my side.
Lesson Number 3: Projectize what you want to happen, and it will.
At 54 and down to a mere 100 pounds, I found myself in Seattle where my eldest daughter lived. I was happy to be cooking and taking care of my grandkids. But I had an eager candidate, a handsome Texan naturopath whom I met on the Net the year before when my sister put my photo on Match.com. We had been corresponding and he was trying to help Ellen look for natural alternatives to a cancer cure.
I was attracted to his looks and profession. He also sang a la Frank Sinatra. When he invited me to move to Texas and be his wife, I quickly said yes. He nursed me back to health and soon I bounced back with lots of energy. But, after just two road trips from our home—one to the east to visit my sister in Virginia and the other west to visit another sister in California—he dropped a bomb: he was tired of travel.
Lesson Number 4: Long distance relationships do not reveal the whole person.
Then a life-altering event happened. After four sisters, three daughters and two granddaughters, I just had to take care of my first-ever grandson who had just been born in Calgary. But the Texan did not understand my Filipino heart. Against his vehement objections, I puffed my last cigarette, bravely threw the unfinished pack away, and flew to Canada. With my grandson in my arms, I filed for divorce.
When a second grandson was born in Seattle, I went back to the US. To while idle hours away, I volunteered as a small business counselor for the Service Corps of Retired Executives. After people “discovered” my wealth of experience, I was invited to teach at three institutions of higher learning. I was babysitting in the day and teaching at night and on weekends. I was doomed, until my sister again advertised me on Match.com. Soon I had a date on Friday and Saturday evenings.
Lesson Number 5: Cast your net wide and you will find him.
I had already been dating the controller of a Seattle company for weeks when a businessman came in. He had been President and CEO of a national printing solutions company, board director for the Document Management Industry Association of America, a member of his parish pastoral council, and in the speakers’ bureau of the Republican Party. But he was eight inches taller and five years older than I would like. So, I dodged his invitations to meet.
But when my sister, then the World Public Speaking Champion, was a guest speaker at my Toastmasters’ Club where I was President, I wanted THEM to meet. She heads our Philippine Institute for the Deaf and he owned a printing press. He could give our school free brochures! But when he arrived, he was so handsome that I began to move the controller to Friday evenings and reserved him for Saturdays.
Until my nine-year-old granddaughter cried foul and said, “Mama, if you don’t choose Bill, I will never speak to you again.” That was when the 7Qs proved useful. Both of suitors were equal in IQ and I think also in FQ, financial quotient. I saw how judiciously they spent, the jobs they had, and the homes they kept. PQ, political quotient, was also the same. But, being a Catholic, Bill edged the controller in SQ, spirituality quotient. And because he conducted himself better during the courtship, Bill was tops in MQ or moral quotient, the belief in right or wrong. Good thing Bill also scored higher in DQ, desirability quotient. But that should be the least important. And Bill clearly had the higher EQ.
Lesson Number 6: There are six other Qs more important than DQ.
My family was right. Bill genuinely cared about people. A year later, we married, he sold his business, and I resigned all my posts. We bought an RV and crossed North America in an eight-year odyssey that led to my first book. But the inner journey of becoming a wife was not easy. Finding him is only half the story. Keeping him is the other half, the more difficult part, actually.
RV life was so different. You had new neighbors every week or so. We soon found out that there was no truth to the throw pillow we bought at a Village Fest that said, “We get along in our RV ‘cuz we have no room to disagree!” All couples disagree, about small things and big things. Bill and I met late in life with deep-set values and habits, with cultural, gender, and individual differences to boot. In 2013, after a succession of conflicts, we decided to give space to each other. Bill left me in Seattle with my daughter the day after New Year and he went to help his son in Boise.
Our pastoral counselor directed us to consider the separation a spiritual retreat. When Bill came back on Valentine’s Day, we realized that we needed to move to a new phase of traveling. After 49 American states, nine Canadian provinces, and six Mexican states, we needed to move on to a discovery of the world. To do that, we needed a good base. In October of that year, we settled on the Viewpoint Golf Resort in Phoenix, Arizona and sold our RV. With four months of timeshares, we have been to 48 countries since.
Lesson Number 7: Change your circumstances to reboot.
My great luck is that Bill is a man with a high EQ. He had a 29-year marriage that ended only because his wife passed on due to cancer. My first marriage ended after nine years; my second, only two. His constant plea was for me to view the totality of the relationship and its long-term nature, not any specific situation and certainly not just the moment. In hindsight, he showed me how the firm commitment to stay together, despite differences, is the first secret to a lasting marriage.
Lesson Number 8: Commitment is the first secret to a lasting marriage.
Whereas my instinct was for fight and flight, I learned to calm down and compromise. I realized that there was no need to withdraw every time one encounters a difficulty, because staying offered much bigger rewards. I discovered that this was easier when there is deep respect for the other. We came to accept that we would probably never have been the least bit attracted to each other at the height of our careers when we were very competitive. But at the age when we met, our past accomplishments were the source of that deep respect for each other. This is the second secret to a good marriage.
Lesson Number 9: Don’t forget the respect you have for the other.
Finally, we had one thing that we solidly shared. Underneath we had the same travelers’ souls. RVing became an extended honeymoon when every scenic sight became not just a marvel but also, at times, a coping mechanism. And it continued as we conquered city after city in continent after continent. Travel nurtured both of us and gave us the spices to fuse the disparate flavors. This is secret number three.
The pillow in the RV (Photo courtesy of Carolina Esguerra-Colborn)
Lesson Number 10: Share one deep passion.
Through all these failures and successes, I realized that travel does not have to be just the physical trip from one place to the next. I have discovered that inner journeys are a great by-product of outer ones. For me, one of those has unmistakably been to finally become a wife.
* This was the talk the author delivered via Zoom before the International Public Relations Association, Philippine Chapter last Feb. 26, 2021.
Carolina Esguerra-Colborn
Carolina Esguerra-Colborn’s second book, “Cruising Past Seventy. It’s Not Only about Outer Journeys. It’s Also about Inner Ones” can be ordered at https://tinyurl.com/y22sfwds.
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