We are back with another fabulous Power Couple interview with Fawn & Keith Weaver. She’s the creator of Happy Wives Club (HWC), and he is the Happy Husband who has stood beside her for over ten years. In addition to running her successful blog, Fawn is also President of a vacation rental company and Keith is a Senior Executive for a motion picture studio.
This couple leads by example. The true love they have for each other is felt even through a phone conversation. This is a couple who dated for eight months before deciding on a whim to forego the traditional wedding they were planning, and instead elope in Las Vegas in 2003. They realized there was no reason to wait any longer.
Fawn started the HWC because, despite divorce statistics and the images in the media, she knew she couldn’t be the only happy wife. So with Keith’s support, she set out on a mission. What started as just a small group of 5 family members and friends has now grown to over 500,000 members who are “Not Stepford. Not Desperate. We just love our hubbies!”
Just last week, Fawn’s new book, Happy Wives Club launched. The HWC book is Fawn’s journey on a worldwide search for the secrets of a great marriage, by interviewing couples that had been married for 25 years or longer. I was fortunate enough to receive an advance copy of the book, and can honestly say: it is not like any marriage book you’ve read before. It’s funny. It’s real. It’s extraordinary. If you’re looking to keep, renew or create a happy marriage, this book is for you.
Check out the interview for a peek inside the lives of this happy power couple.
BMWK: Let’s start with how you guys met. What is your love story?
Keith: The only thing about me telling this story is that she’s going to interrupt and correct. [laughs]. My mother used to be a hairdresser, and more specifically she was Fawn’s hairdresser.
Fawn: This is the part where he gets the story wrong [laughs].
Keith: … but you need to go with my version [laughs]. So ironically, in all of her years and with all the clients that she’s had, my mom has never tried to set me up with anyone. But she described Fawn as being someone who came in and was very poised, and she was quiet and she’d read. I just thought, “This was an odd description of someone”, so it basically just means that she’s literate and quiet [laughs].
So my mom says, “I’ve met your wife. You’ve got to call this girl named Fawn” and I said “Yea, no.” My mom kept building me up to Fawn as well… but she was not interested either. My mom gave me Fawn’s number, and after a lot of pushing, I finally called her. And really, I don’t even know why I did it. Maybe it was just to get my mom off my back. And what developed from there was just an amazing phone conversation, which was interesting because I don’t like to talk on the phone.
I almost didn’t want to spoil our good phone relationship by meeting her in person because my mom didn’t describe what she looked like physically. So in my head, Fawn was just really big on personality, but not so much on looks [laughs]. But after about a month, we agreed to meet and it was at that moment, I knew I wanted to marry her and spend the rest of my life with her.
BMWK: Being that you have such busy careers, how do you create that time for each other and make each other priority?
Fawn: Well what we did from the very beginning is we surrounded ourselves with other couples who have done this well. We would ask them, “What makes your marriage work?” Then we would listen to couples that work through struggles, and we would listen just as intently to figure out what we should avoid.
One of the things we found in talking to different people is that daily time of connection is critical. It can’t be a once a week date night. It has to be daily. So every morning, we have what we call our “Weaver Coffee Hour”, depending on how crazy our week is or how crazy our day is.
For an hour we just connect. There’s no agenda. We could just sit and sip coffee or tea and talk about everything that happened that day before, or what’s on our agenda this upcoming day. But having that daily connection to download is important. And then we do that at the end of the day as often as we possibly can. But the morning is non-negotiable. We do it every day.
BMWK: That’s really great. I love the term “non-negotiable”. What would you say are some of the key components to having a happy marriage?
Fawn: In general, I would say the number one thing you must have is mutual respect. Number one. Facing God is important. And the reason why I don’t lead with that is because I think that that becomes a lazy answer for a lot of people. It’s an escape. If you put God as the center of your marriage, everything is okay. But what exactly does that mean? Does that mean you’re kinder to each other? Does that mean you’re gentler with each other? What does ‘put God first’ mean? And so that’s why I generally don’t lead with that. What people are usually lacking are the things to do, not the things to believe.
BMWK: How do you deal with challenges as they arise in your marriage?
Fawn: The thing that Keith and I learned from other people, and it’s been really helpful, is when there is a challenge, we actually don’t come against each other. When we have a challenge, we hunker down together to come against whatever the challenge is.
Keith: That’s right. We approach everything as a team. We like to say ‘Team Weaver’ because that’s what it is. It’s just Fawn and I against whatever those obstacles may be.
BMWK: Keith, what would be your one or two marriage tips for the husbands out there (or future husbands) for having a successful and happy marriage?
Keith: Even before we were married, one of the things that I value tremendously now, and would highly recommend, is premarital counseling. Men and women communicate differently as a general matter. As individuals, the way we were raised might be very different. Sorting through things like the facilitation from accounts, financial matters, how we think about sexual relations with each other; it’s critical to have those conversations beforehand. What do we think about raising kids? What do we think about our faith? When couples are in their courtship stage and presumably enamored with each other, that’s when those difficult questions need to be sorted out.
Fawn: I think you know this, Christine. I talked about it on HWC, is that so far we’ve not been able to have kids. And for a lot of people, it’s a really tough road when there are fertility issues. And for us, it’s never been an issue. And I think a part of that is, we talked about it in premarital counseling. That was one of our ‘what ifs’.
We played the ‘what if’ game a lot while we were dating, and I think it’s great before marriage and even after marriage. It was just ‘what if’ followed by any random question. One of the ‘what ifs’ was, “What if we can’t have kids?” Talking about these things ahead of time prepares you so that when it does come your way, you are able to address it, and you’ve already come to an agreement as to where you’re going to stand. Will you adopt? Will you not? And so then you end up not having that struggle because of it.
BMWK: So going back to the book, how did the idea for the Happy Wives Club book come about? Especially the idea to travel the world?
Fawn: It came from the HWC Facebook community. The one thing that I would do is just pose questions to the couples married 25 years or more. I would ask the wives “What is your secret to a happy marriage?” or some variation of that question. And what I found was, every time I posed the question, no matter where a person in the world lives, their answer was almost identical.
It was like you’d meet people that were raised by the same family in the same country in the same household, but I knew that wasn’t the case. They were all over the world. And so the idea came from looking at this and thinking “Is it possible that there is a universal secret to a happy marriage?” and the only way I’d be able to find that out is to go on their turf.
BMWK: Do you have any last words of advice or encouragement that you want to share with the Black and Married with Kids family?
Keith: Marriage is fantastic! We recommend it. Just communicate with your spouse.
Fawn: For the African American community specifically, I do not believe that we are going to ever be able to get to where it is that we are destined to be. We can fight, we can blame, we could do whatever we want, but until we get to a place where we are building solid families and building generational wealth, we’re never going to catch up in this country. So if we want to propel and to be successful and really start keeping up with the Jones’, we need to stay married and we need to raise our kids.
BMWK: Amen to that. I love it. I love it! Well thank you guys so much. This was so fun.
Be sure to leave some words of encouragement for this happy couple and don’t forget to grab your copy of the Happy Wives Club book. It will bless your marriage.