The former Senior Technical Assistant to the Ebonyi State Governor on Media, Monday Kenneth Eze and his wife, are celebrating their 19th wedding anniversary today, November 15.

Mr Eze took to his Facebook page to mark the milestone and shared seven principles that have kept their marriage for 19 years.

He said he and his wife keep minimal secrets from each other, they know their respective phone locks, e-mail passwords, ATM pins, and bank account balances.

According to Mr Eze, who shares six children with his wife, they intentionally chose each other and vowed to keep their friendship alive.

Read his lengthy post below,

“NINETEEN YEARS ON STELLA-THERAPY! For six hundred million, four thousand and eight hundred seconds or 6,944.5 days, I have been happily and excitedly married to my STELLAvite! Apart from our family alter to the omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent and omni-loving God who has been our anchor and perpetual help, the following is the simple marriage compass we set for ourselves,” he wrote.

1. Going into marriage was our willful decision and in taking the decision, we respectively confessed and laid out our true characters and dispositions, comprising the good, the bad and the ugly on the table. So, we knew each other. We knew our respective strengths and weaknesses. There was minimal room for negative surprises.

2. We resolved to focus on our strengths or positive sides and help each other change or improve on our respective weaknesses or negative sides. So, we knew the task before us.

3. We swore to keep our friendship perpetually aflame and let it serve rightly as the foundation of our “husband-and-madam” status. This implies that even though marriage is “for better or for worse”, we shall work hard to be channels of the better and team up to abate or manage the “worse” when it comes from extraneous factors. The “worse” in marriage should not proceed from any of the partners.

4. Realizing that we are imperfect and under paragraph 3 above, we resolved that in times of misunderstanding, suspicion, actual provocations or outright search for each other’s trouble, we do them and react to them like friends. We particularly fixed boundaries on how to react to negative conduct from each other: That boundary is to react as friends and not as enemies. Truly, the way an offended friend reacts to an offence is significantly different from the way an enemy reacts.

5. As a follow-up to the 4 above, we made forgiveness, penitence and humility important ingredients of our daily lives. Hence, for us, no offence is too big to be forgiven, but the forgiven must terminate the offence and make necessary amendments.

6. We also closed all gaps and have minimal or near-zero secrets between us: We know our respective screen locks, e-mail passwords, ATM PINs, our friends, bank accounts and their balances, locations, what makes each other happy and so on.

7. We have never involved a third party in our marriage, but we have never made hearty discussions and resolutions difficult.”