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This year, Farida and Clyde Cooper, owners of Plume restaurant in Matakana, celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary following their marriage in Bombay, India.
Farida says the marriage had a rocky start due to their different religious backgrounds.
Clyde was Catholic whereas Farida was a Parsee – an Indian adherent of the Zoroastrian faith.
The pair met and fell in love on their first day at college in Bombay, but Farida was so afraid of her parents’ reaction that she kept the romance a secret for the next 10 years.
This was despite the fact that the two faiths have some things in common. Both are monotheistic and the three wise men (or Magi) who visited the newborn Christ in Bethlehem are said to have been Zoroastrian priests.
Clyde eventually put his foot down and said if Farida did not tell her parents about their relationship by a specified date, they would be finished.
Even then Farida could not do it, but confided her dilemma to her sister who ended up telling the whole family.
Farida says her parents came to accept the idea, but it made for a tense wedding ceremony in a Catholic church – a place that was entirely alien for them.
It also meant that Farida missed out on a traditional Parsee wedding – typically lavish affairs attended by hundreds of people with mountains of food laid out on banana leaves. But Farida says such a ceremony would have made her feel guilty thinking of all the hungry people just outside.
As things turned out, Farida says any challenges in her marriage have arisen over social rather than religious differences.
For example, Catholics in India were more likely to go to parties and stay out late, whereas she was brought up more strictly and didn’t venture out after 8pm.
Farida has brought up her own children as Catholic, going to communion classes with them, though she herself remains a Parsee.
She says the bedrock principles of Zoroastrianism with its emphasis on good thoughts, good words and good deeds will serve any marriage well. Not that this means everything will be plain sailing.
“You have to work at marriage – no matter what religion you are or what colour your skin is – you have to work at it,” she says.
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