Despite age gap, it’s ‘a marriage made in heaven’
“We met online on a Christian chat. At the time, I had a dog that I loved that was sick. I was looking for somebody to pray for my puppy. He said, ‘I’ll pray with you.’ After that, we chatted online for about two months. Then we started talking on the phone. We never asked each other our age or anything. We fell in love.”
“I hadn’t asked her to marry me yet. But she had kind of an abusive thing going on in her home. I felt like I needed to get her out of harm’s way. So I flew to Georgia to get her. I took a wedding ring with me. On the way, I asked her, ‘By the way, how old are you?’ I was 60 at the time. She was 18. A few days after we got back to Texas, we got married in a ditch in front of Ellington Air Force Base while an air show was going on. Fake bombs exploding in the background and everything. The next day we left on a seven-day honeymoon cruise to the Caribbean.
“I’ve been married several times before, and I have six kids. Three or four of them went kind of crazy when I told them about us. They couldn’t accept Dad marrying an 18-year-old girl. A lot of people think I’m her daddy and stuff like that because we’re 42 years apart. But the age thing really doesn’t make any difference to us. Life’s life, you know? You’ve just got to grab it and live it your own way.
“We’ve been married for over 11 years. We get along great. We don’t fuss. We don’t fight. We pray together. We eat together. We play together. It’s just one of those marriages made in heaven. But we’re here on earth. So it’s kind of like heaven on earth.”
— Suzie and Carl Beam
