Some did—my paternal grandparents were a love-at-first-sight case. After my grandfather passed away, my grandmother was so heartbroken she basically stopped living.

Some didn’t—it wasn’t after my maternal grandfather held grandma’s hand to the hot stove, or beat her black and blue, that she finally got up the nerve to throw him out and file for divorce; it was when he started to go after their kids. Even so, as a single mother she faced all kinds of difficulties and discrimination socially and in the workforce.

But I can’t even imagine what things would have been like if she had been forced to stick with him.

And regardless of how much my paternal grandparents loved each other, they were still chained together, both by society’s expectations and by laws that, for example, wouldn’t let my grandmother have her own bank account until the mid-70s.