Tag #121288 - Interview #101947 (Saul Rotariu)

I married in the meantime. I met my wife-to-be at the workplace. I married late in life, in keeping with the family tradition. I married in 1972, I was 35 by then, after a long, long friendship with my wife. My wife, Aurelia, is a Christian and her family frowned upon this friendship. And, in order not to upset her parents – she is a very kind-hearted woman, she is warm-hearted, she wouldn’t hurt a fly – she kept saying: ‘Never mind, there’s no need to rush. Never mind, we don’t need a piece of paper, no one is going to ask us for an account number.’ We were more modern by then, we weren’t particularly anxious to get married, things like those. It is more difficult with elderly people – her parents were older: one has certain notions and ideas which aren’t that easy to discard from one’s subconscious. And we said: ‘Come, let’s wait some more, let’s not do this just yet.’ We didn’t live together, but I used to go over to their place, she would come to ours, it was a known fact…

Eventually, we decided to get married. We saw the years pass by, and our friendship had strengthened too much. We were only married at the registrar’s office, and we threw a party at home for family and friends. And the bride spent around three to four days preparing this party. There were almost 30 people present: relatives, my brother, my wife’s brother, friends, colleagues. And many children would gather: my brother had three children, my wife’s brother had two, there were friends who also had children. We had a neighbor here, a woman who had a little boy – and almost all of them were of the same age. We had no children of our own.