People do and will have differing political opinions about the one-term United States presidency of Jimmy Carter, but it would be difficult to find fault with the success of his marriage.
Early next month, Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, will celebrate their 70th anniversary, a milestone in its own right but one that may seem increasingly harder to reach with couples tying the knot later, if at all, and a still too high divorce rate.
Like all couples, the former first couple have had their ups and downs. But unlike many couples, they did not give up at the first sign of strife, treat their marriage as an experiment or leave one another to find themselves.
While it is not nor ever has been true that half of all U.S. marriages end in divorce, most people would agree that the divorce rate has climbed since the Carters married on July 7, 1946.
Carter was a young naval officer when the couple married, and the then-Rosalynn Smith was 18 years old. While Carter was in the Navy, his wife was struggling to take care of one, then two, then three young boys. Then when the couple moved back to Plains to run the family agribusiness when Carter's father died, they lived in public housing and struggled to make ends meet.
The former president says of the time that "I was completely dominant," and his wife has acknowledged the loneliness and difficulty in the period and said she was "miserable."
They stayed together, though, and things got better. In time, he realized her status as an equal partner in their marriage.
However, "the worst thing we've been through," according to Carter, were the years immediately following his re-election campaign loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980 and their collaboration on the book "Everything To Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life." Ironically, the book strained their marriage. They worked on it in separate rooms, sometimes not talking for days.
Eventually, Rosalynn Carter told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2002, "We worked through all that. We disagree just like everybody else. We have a good relationship. Everybody needs some space of his or her own. That is what we learned when we came home."
Today's couples could learn something not from a former president and first lady but from a couple who survived the bumps in the road and came out smiling and holding hands on the other side: Respect each other, communicate, give each other space, don't give up.