Divorced Couple Reunites After 42 Long Years of Legal Separation
In the unlikeliest of love stories, a couple in New Bedford, Massachusetts recently rekindled their love affair 42 years after getting a divorce, according to a story from South Coast Today.
Sources indicate that Ken Kidd and Lindell Magnin, who currently live in the northern part of New Bedford with their three Shih Tzus, celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary this January, although they were only together for three of those years.
The couple met at a ballroom dance when she was 18 and he was 17, and started seeking each other every weekend after their initial encounter.
After their marriage in the mid-1960s, Ken joined the Air Force, went for training to Oklahoma, and was later shipped to Guam for 18 months of service. In Ken’s words, “[a] year-and-a-half apart is never good for a relationship.”
From 1967 to 1968, the couple lived together in Oklahoma, and both of them agree that those 12 months represented the best year of their lives.
However, once Ken was sent to Guam, the relationship soon soured. The 18 months of separation was very hard on the couple, and it was made more difficult by their inability to communicate while he was overseas.
According to Ken, he was occasionally allowed to call his wife from a special booth on base, but the conversation was usually limited to just a few seconds, and a military officer was there controlling the switchboard and overseeing the conversation.
Today, of course, troops are constantly in communication with their families via email and video chatting, which has likely prevented an incalculable number of potential divorce filings.
Of course, Ken and Lindell also admit that they failed to write each other very often—particularly Ken, who admits that he was so consumed by his work that he rarely had the time or energy to pen long letters.
At the time, Ken says that he and his counterparts were “bombing Vietnam every day” and “working long hours,” working conditions that certainly don’t offer many opportunities for quiet reflection.
When Ken returned home on July 1969, the couple couldn’t handle their differences, and made a clean break. They had not accumulated much property, so their divorce process was relatively quick and painless.
After the divorce, Lindell flew to Los Angeles to catch a flight back home, and she and Ken never saw each other after that.
Well, they never saw each other until a few years ago, more than 40 years after their separation, when Ken’s 19-year-old son convinced his father to join Facebook, where, lo and behold, Ken encountered his former bride.
After sharing a few messages, the pair agreed to meet to catch up on each other’s lives and realized they still loved each other. The rest, as they say, is history.
