'Do you think your marriage will last?'

What sort of question is that?

This is exactly what I was thinking when on my hen night - just before I was about to get married - I was asked by a lady in the nightclub toilets whether I thought my marriage would last.

I wanted to say, 'No I don't, but I thought I'd get married anyway'.

But that would have been a passive-aggressive response.

Instead, I replied with, 'I hope so'.

Not quite a convincing answer, I know. But it was the truth of how I felt.

The thing is, true hope is a positive motivator to cultivate an expectation, trust, and desire for something to happen.

However, we were just teenagers at the time, only 18 and 19 years old, and my parents were divorced, so it would seem inevitable that I would end up divorced too.

The real kick in the teeth though was that the longest anyone gave us was just two years of marriage. So on that basis, our marriage was doomed to fail even before it began.

Here's the good news - 30 years later, we are still together, sharing the same values, and living in hope for the continuation of an everlasting marriage.

Here are some photos of us on our wedding day, and now.

Hope isn't the only thing that contributed to the length of our marriage.

In fact, there are just three main principles that we have always stuck to in our relationship that have helped us to make it a strong, long, and loving marriage.