Couple With Record-breaking Number Of Marriages
CULTURE | October 3, 2019
Divorce. Torn photograph of wedding cake topper. Source: (gettyimages.com)
The institution of marriage means different things to different people. Some people would rather be institutionalized than to be married. Other people throughout history did not even have a choice because their marriage was pre-arranged by their families. Then there are those people who just love being married. They love the idea of being in love and newly married so much so that they marry multiple times.
Glynn Wolfe and Linda Essex Wolfe
Glynn Wolfe and Linda Essex Wolfe were two of those people. Glynn Wolfe was married a total of 29 times and even held the Guinness Book of World Records for the man with the most marriages up until his death in 1997. At age 88, Wolfe’s wife at that time, Linda Wolfe, had the record for the woman with the most marriages with 23 marriages. The two of them did not even live in the same state. She lived in Indiana and he lived in California. They had only actually spent a week together during their first year of marriage and were actually planning on celebrating their anniversary by renewing their vows but death interfered with their plans.
Glynn Wolfe
Born in July of 1908, Glynn Wolfe lived and became a Baptist minister in Blythe, California. His shortest marriage was 19 days. His longest was a total of eleven years to Christine Camacho, who was his 28th wife. Out of all of his marriages, only three of his marriages were re-marriages to the same woman, Charlotte Devane, Katherine Archer, and Sharon Goodwin. Only five of them ended through death with the last death being due to his death.
Not really that big a surprise that none of his 29 wives showed up to retrieve his body at death, but it is surprising that only one of his offspring out of 19 children, 40 grandchildren, and 19 great-grandchildren showed up for his funeral. Ironically, he died of heart disease and his body was cremated.
Linda Essex Wolfe
Linda Wolfe, Glynn’s last wife, was very much a hopeless romantic, even though their marriage in 1996 was just a publicity stunt. Holding the Guinness Book of World Records for the woman having the most marriages, she was not one who liked to live alone. She has had some rather interesting marriages. In 1957, her very first marriage was actually for love even though she was only 16. She fell in love with someone who was 31. She has had a strange variety of husbands: some were cheating husbands, some gay, some homeless, some abusive, even one who was a one-eyed prison inmate. One of the abusive husbands not only choked her but actually turned her lip inside out and another one locked the refrigerator with a chain and padlock.
Weddings in themselves can be beautiful events but marriage is quite a different story. Without true commitment, it will not last. In order for love to last in a marriage, there has to be commitment no matter what the circumstances are. Just as the original vows say “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.”
