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OnLove
NUPTIALS
DONNA WHITFIELD DECOSTA
Jennifer Snyder & Eric Lamarre
Jennifer Snyder, 37, is a conservation research volunteer. Eric Lamarre, 48, manages Lee Stocking Island in the Bahamas, where they live.
Wedding date: May 6.
Location: Romora Bay Resort and Marina and the Landing restaurant on Harbour Island, Bahamas.
Guests: None.
How they met: Eric’s stepsister
introduced Eric to her co-worker Jennifer in 2003 at an Easter brunch in the District, where they both lived. Eric tried to jump into a conversation with Jennifer as she talked to a friend about her Peace Corps experience in South America, because he had served there as well. But Jennifer and her friend were too busy chatting. Eric and Jennifer didn’t really have a conversation until a couple of years later, when they went with friends to a film screening.
The proposal: Eric applied for his job in the Bahamas last August and was talking to Jennifer about the logistics of moving as she was doing the dishes. He mentioned that it might be easier if they were married. Jennifer, caught off guard, asked if he was popping the question. He didn’t answer one way or the other, Jennifer says. Eric thought that wasn’t the proper way to propose, so two weeks later he made dinner and over dessert asked for Jennifer’s hand.
The wedding: They planned an elopement, buying their rings and Jennifer’s dress in the District before moving to the Bahamas last fall. Five years after their first date, the couple had a civil ceremony in a garden gazebo.
Honeymoon: Diving and exploring Harbour Island’s pink-sand beaches.
— Kathleen Hom
NIKKI KAHN/THE WASHINGTON POST/
A LOT OF HELP: Friends and family have supported Chuck Wills and Tonya Sanders through her illness and their long courtship.
by Ellen McCarthy
None of Tonya Sanders’s friends un- derstood why she invited Stanley Ronald “Chuck” Wills to move into her Silver Spring apartment back in 1997. Wills was, in his own words, “a player, a ladies’ man. Every time she’d see me, she’d see me with a different woman.” But Sanders had been infatuated with Wills, 10 years her senior, since she was a teenager in the 1980s. Her mom and step- father would have Wills over to hang out, and Sanders would spend the whole night staring at a man who cracked him- self up and took anyone within earshot along for the good time. “It was the way he carried himself,”
says Sanders, now 40. Wills hadn’t seen Sanders in several years when he stopped by to visit her par- ents in 1994. Sanders, by then a single mom of two young boys, walked into the room looking different than he’d remem- bered, very much a grown-up. She gave Wills her pager number and told him to come over for breakfast sometime. He took her up on the offer a few weeks
later, and as she laid a plate before him, Sanders started to talk. “She was like, ‘I know you probably
MARK F. SYPHER
Alina Martin & Marc Fuentebella
Alina Martin, 32, is a program manager. Marc Fuentebella, 35, is a business analyst. They will live in San Diego.
Wedding date: May 15. Location: St. Regis Hotel in Northwest. Guests: 84.
How they met: In 1999, Marc started at a technology company a day after Alina was hired. They worked in adjacent offices, and they ran into each other often. After six months or so, they started working on projects together, which led to late nights in the office. Co-workers started commenting that Marc and Alina were dating. At first, they just laughed at the comments, Marc says, but in 2001, they gave dating a try.
The proposal: On New Year’s Eve 2008, the two had dinner in the District and then went to Alina’s house in Reston to watch the Times Square ball drop. At midnight, Marc pulled out the ring and popped the question. The first words out of Alina’s mouth were, “Are you serious?” Because he hadn’t proposed around Christmas, she had assumed it wasn’t going to happen until Valentine’s Day.
The wedding: Marc moved to San Diego in March 2009, while Alina stayed in Reston. He tried to be involved with the wedding planning as much as possible, talking to vendors over the phone and through e-mail, so it wasn’t too stressful for Alina. The two had a lot of out-of-town guests and created gift bags for them with maps for sightseeing.
Honeymoon: A winter trip to Turks and Caicos.
—Kathleen Hom
never experienced love . . . for somebody to really love you for who you are,’ ” Wills recalls. “Evidently she must’ve known that I never took the time to really sit down and get to know a woman. So she said, ‘Just give me a chance. And I’m go- ing to show you love.’ ”
Wills was touched, though not ready for the kind of relationship Sanders had in mind. They kept in contact and “really got to know each other,” Wills says, but he also continued to see other women, in- cluding the mother of his third child. Things had gone south in that relation- ship by the time Sanders called Wills in 1997 to say that she’d gotten a new apart- ment and — despite her friends’ ob- jections — wanted him to come live with her. “A lot of people didn’t understand how I felt,” she says. “I said, ‘That man — he’s a
good man. And I just have to be patient and get it out of him.’ ” Domesticity suited Wills, an iron work-
er, more than he expected. They began raising their five kids as siblings, taking bike rides and picnics and trips to the beach. Wills fantasized out loud about the days when the children would be grown so he and Sanders could buy a mo- tor home and travel the country. He de- flected talk of marriage but routinely told
had worked as a nurse and beautician, in- creasingly lost control of her muscles, forcing her to use a motorized wheel- chair. Wills quit his job to care for her full-time. During the one week Sanders spent in a nursing home for therapy, he visited three or four times a day, unsatis- fied with the way aides cleaned and assis- ted her. On a night when he went out for a bit, leaving her with a friend and their grown children, he called home to check
‘It was the way he carried himself’
Tonya Sanders & Chuck Wills
Sanders he want- ed to grow old with her. They’d
been
happy together for a decade when Wills came home to find Sanders crying. She told him to sit down. Earlier in the day her doctor had ex- plained that the cause of her occa- sional falls and
muscle weakness was ALS. “I was like, ‘What is ALS?’ ” he remem-
bers. “And she explained it to me — the Lou Gehrig’s disease.’ ” “If you’re going to leave me, leave me
now,” she told him. “Don’t wait.” “And I looked at her and looked at her tears and I said to myself, ‘This woman gave me all the best years of my life,’ ” he says. “There’s no way in the hell I would leave her.”
Over the next few years Sanders, who
on her four times in two hours. “That’s my ev-
erything right there,” he says. “She means more to me than the Earth itself.” Sanders’s long- time friend Mi- chell Jackson was one of Wills’s harshest critics when they first got together. But
last year she asked if he had a minute to talk. “I said, ‘You know, for years I didn’t like you. I couldn’t stand the ground you walked on,” she recalls. “And I said, ‘But I can honestly tell you, the respect I have for you, for taking care of her, for not leav- ing her, not abandoning her, it goes with- out saying.’ He didn’t waiver. . . . He trans- formed himself to be what she needed.” Sanders attends regular support groups and has become an activist, lobby- ing for ALS research on Capitol Hill. Most
people with ALS die within three to five years of diagnosis, though some live sig- nificantly longer. Wills accompanies Sanders to all of her doctor appoint- ments, but he asks not to be told about her prognosis.
“I deal with it as it comes. Don’t tell me
what’s going to happen to her — I don’t want to hear that,” he says. “Because there’s only one man that I know that can help her and that’s the man upstairs. And I pray every day — even sometimes that I can take the pain that she has.” In January, Sanders and Wills attended
a 40th birthday party for Jackson. Her husband gave a toast in her honor, talk- ing about what marriage meant in his life. “And it kinda hit home plate for me,” Wills says. For the first time in his life, he started to think he might want to be married. “I was scared of getting married, I guess. But everybody looked at me and said, ‘Chuck, you’re already doing every- thing,’ ” he says. “And I’ve tried every- thing in life, almost. What’s wrong with trying one more thing?” In February, he got down on his knees
and asked Sanders to be his wife. “I was so happy,” says Sanders, who speaks on her own, though sometimes us- es the assistance of a computer when her vocal cords get tired. On May 7, Wills’s 50th birthday, they
wed at New Revival Kingdom Church in Capitol Heights, with their five children serving as attendants. Throughout the lunchtime reception that followed, Sand- ers stared adoringly at Wills, just as she had as a teenager. Wills is content with married life. But
there’s something else he’s looking for- ward to:Within a few years, their young- est two children should be out of the house. Then, as he often tells them, “me and mom are gonna sell everything and get that bus. And we gonna travel.”
mccarthye@washpost.com
To view more photos of Tonya Sanders and Chuck Wills’s wedding, visit
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BOOKS
‘Sex at Dawn’ authors: A little infidelity is only natural
by Ellen McCarthy
It was Bill Clinton who first got Chris- topher Ryan thinking about monogamy. As a doctoral student in psychology in
the late 1990s, he kept wondering: “How is it that the most powerful man in the world is getting publicly humiliated for having a casual sexual relationship with someone?”
And it wasn’t just Clinton, of course. Again and again, leaders were putting themselves in a position where “they could lose everything” for the sake of an affair. Ryan devoted his dissertation to an
examination of the roots of human sex- ual behavior and suggests, in new a book co-written with his wife, psychiatrist Cacilda Jethá, that we reevaluate the idea that monogamy comes naturally to men and women — and look at whether it should even be something we require
of our spouses. In “Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Ori- gins of Modern Sexuality,” to be pub- lished this summer by HarperCollins, Ryan and Jethá point to anthropological and biological evidence that humans are designed to seek variety in sexual experi- ences. The myth, says Ryan, who writes a
blog at
PsychologyToday.com, is that “you should be completely happy, com- pletely fulfilled with one partner for 50 years. But that’s not the design of the hu- man organism.” “In fact,” he says from their home in Barcelona, “the human organism is de- signed for the exact opposite of that.” “Adultery has been documented in
every human culture studied,” Ryan and Jethá write in the book. If monogamy is such a natural state, the authors ask, why are so many people driven to cheat? Ryan and Jethá trace many of our modern ideas about matrimony and mo-
nogamy back to Darwin and a Victorian understanding of sexuality. To support their theory that the story is much more complex, they examine early human cul- tures and those of remote tribes that don’t place a high value on monogamy. Some peoples believed babies could re- ceive genetic material from multiple fa- thers, so women were encouraged to have sex with men who could pass on dif- ferent positive characteristics. Ryan’s hope is that the book will prompt readers to question their beliefs about monogamy, though he knows many will be incredulous at the sugges- tion that adultery comes naturally. The authors, who are married, are ac- tually in favor of matrimony — especially, Ryan says, when “it provides an emo- tionally and economically stable envi- ronment for a kid to grow up in.” The problem, as he sees it, comes when
an expectation of absolute fidelity is placed on marriage. "There’s a lot of suf-
fering — and what I would say is unnec- essary suffering — between couples who have unnecessary expectations of what life is going to be like,” he says. The authors draw a sharp distinction
between love and lust — in their view, an act of sex outside of marriage doesn’t necessarily diminish the love one has for a spouse. “When it’s just sex,” they write, “that’s all it is.” In their own 11-year relationship
they’ve “had a similar understanding from the get-go,” says Ryan, 48. Americans in particular, he adds, see
adultery as grounds for divorce, while many Europeans are inclined toward a more laissez-faire attitude when it comes to marital transgressions. Their hope, he says, is that the book will spark honest conversations between couples, and incite them “to have a more tolerant attitude toward themselves, and their relationships.”
mccarthye@washpost.com
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