Both Bono and his wife Ali understand each other well and are there for each other. Their lives have been a testament to that.
As surprising as it sounds U2 singer Bono aka Paul Hewson is a long-married rock star, just like singers Sting and Jon Bon Jovi. The 59-year-old has found the key to a happy marriage with his wife of more than 37 years Ali Hewson, 58, and it is simpler than we would have realized.
"I love the idea that great relationships have a lower temperature... Ali and I are probably more in love now than when we got together in the first place," he told Rolling Stone, adding that the measured and temperate love is not given enough credit while mad passion is. To him, ordinary love, in which "people work through their problems and stay together" is greater. So, he wrote a song called Ordinary Love.
However, he is not the only one who has it figured out. His ethical fashion business owner wife told Manchester Evening News that her marriage has worked because they like each other, talk to each other, and are passionate about what they do.
"We allow each other to pursue our goals," she said. While Bono as a musician has had to be on the road for a large part of his life, she has gone on missions to Sarajevo and El Salvador because she wants to work towards helping the people of the world.
While they have separate goals in life, improving the state of the world is a shared one. The activist couple has been interested in human rights and politics since they were in school, which is when they met. "Even at school, Bono and I would talk about what was wrong with the world," she said. "We grew up hearing about famine. It's part of being Irish."
The couple met in 1973 at Mount Temple Comprehensive School, where both of them were students. Bono was 13 and Ali 12 when they met. The mother-of-four said that she knew within days of meeting him that he was the one for her.
"He worked very hard at being the heart-throb. He came up to me within the first day and asked, did I know where his class should be going? It was just an excuse to talk to me, and I thought, 'What an eejit.' I remember that on the fourth day at school I saw him walking across the courtyard and it was, bing. That is the guy for me. But we waited until we were 15 before we actually started going out," she said, according to Dublin Live.
They dated for a while and got married in their early twenties in 1982 and a year later his band had become internationally famous. Many of his songs were inspired by his wife, especially the 1989 single The Sweetest Thing, which was written as an apology for working on her birthday.
After multiple kids and years together, many relationships in Hollywood fall apart, but they are a rarity. Their love has grown over the years and it's because they understand each other.
In 2016, the Joshua Tree singer was asked what keeps them close and his response was surprising. "We feel the red carpet has kept us close," he told ETOnline. "If things are going around, we say, 'Let's do the red carpet, certainly.'" He continued, "It's just been a great ride, a magic carpet ride."
When he was honored as the Man of the Year at Glamour's Women of the Year Awards in 2016 in his acceptance speech he paid a tribute to his wife. "I asked my wife, Ali, tonight on receiving this award what I should say," Bono said, according to ETOnline. "And she just repeated what she's been telling me since we were teenagers, which is, 'Don't look down at me, but don't look up at me either. Look across to me. I'm here.'"
The day he received the award was also the 40th anniversary of their first date. He remembered that he walked her to a bus stop on the north side of Dublin, Ireland, and joked that it wasn't love at first sight for her. "She's working up to that," he joked.
Perhaps, another reason they are still together is that Ali is "very independent, smart kind of girl," as her husband calls her, according to the Independent. "I hold on to her much more tightly than she holds on to me," he said, something he attributes to his strong sense of survival.
"A lot of people I grew up with have had difficult outcomes but I have a strong sense of survival, which is why I hold on to people," said the father-of-four.
References:
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/music/why-my-marriage-to-bono-works-1059872
https://www.dublinlive.ie/news/celebs/bono-wife-ali-hewson-celebrate-15061847
https://www.etonline.com/news/202884_bono_shares_secret_to_long_marriage_on_40th_anniversary_of_his_first_date_with_wife
https://www.independent.ie/style/celebrity/celebrity-news/bono-on-wife-ali-shes-an-elusive-character-and-sees-me-as-a-figure-of-amusement-30651259.html
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/bono-the-rolling-stone-interview-3-203774/
