Adrienne Banfield Norris, affectionately known as Gammy, and Rodney Norris have known each other for almost 40 years, constantly drifting in and out of each other’s lives. Gammy and Rodney are sharing their story with Black Love now available on the Black Love + App, and we’ve fallen in love with the couple’s honesty and transparency in how they got a second chance at love after drug relapses and self-doubt got in the way the first time. When the two first met in the 80s, Rodney was drawn to Gammy and had asked her sister to introduce them, but Gammy was married, causing them to keep it strictly friendly. However, the two crossed paths again years later when Gammy was divorced. They started dating soon after she got into recovery but Gammy’s long battle with a heroin-addiction strained their relationship. “I was in full addiction, like I just could not get myself together. And he [Rodney] tried to hang in there with me. I went into treatment, I came out and I started using again,” Gammy says detailing this heavy time in her life and relationship. Gammy’s relapse was the “last straw” for Rodney and he was “ready to move on after that.” After her breakup with Rodney, Gammy struggled to stay single and feel comfortable being alone. At that point in her life, she felt incomplete without a man and felt like she “needed that in her life.” Gammy shortly entered her third marriage, which lasted 25 years, but felt extremely unhappy.
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After her third divorce, Gammy ran into Rodney again with her sponsor at a restaurant, but this time was different than before. Stumbling for words, Gammy expresses it was like a “West Side Story moment when you don’t see anybody else in the room. Oh my God, I ran and I hugged him and I grabbed him. I was so excited to see him, I hadn’t seen him in years.” Despite all the time that had passed, it seemed like the feelings between the two had only intensified during their time apart. “I was head over heels,” Gammy said. “For me, it felt like an opportunity that we had lost before and I just wanted it. I wanted to see where it would go.”
After years of both struggling with addiction and committing to healing themselves, it seemed as though everything had fallen into place for them to have a real shot at love. After multiple relationships and marriages with other people, they found their way to each other again in their 50s, and for Rodney, it felt a little like fate. “I feel like the potential that we saw the first time, that never was realized, maybe we could see that. Because she was clean, the stars were aligned now.” And this time the two wanted to play no games when it came to each other. They would spend hours talking about anything and everything. This was all foreign to Rodney, who admitted he had never experienced a relationship on this level before.
Although they had done a lot of self-work individually, they still needed to learn how to love one another and be there for each other in a way that was acceptable to the other person. In the episode Gammy and Rodney recall having a nasty argument where she told him to “get the f*ck out,” something she still regrets saying to this day. “You can’t talk to people that way. You can’t treat people that way,” Gammy admitted. For Gammy, the biggest adjustment she had to make entering a relationship with Rodney was how she spoke to and treated him. “In other marriages I’ve been unhappy. Unhappiness manifests in how you treat one another and how you speak to one another and how you handle one another.” She owned up to the fact that she got used to communicating in a negative way and cussing people out and had to “learn to change that behavior, to change the way [she] spoke with him and how [she] communicated.”
There are so many reasons to love this couple because they are an inspiration to us all of what we can have if we put the work in (and how you can find love at any age). Gammy and Rodney are the embodiment of how true love and personal transformation can be hard work but is worth it in the end. The time spent apart working on themselves and their own individual healing so that they could be the best version of Adrienne and Rodney for Adrienne and Rodney, before entering a relationship proves to be what has made their six year marriage work. Only then, were they able to find a way to love one another in a way that was nourishing and be emotionally supportive of each other. Despite all the odds against them, they never gave up on love and have only grown more honest and patient in how they care for one another. They never failed to keep one another in check and prioritize themselves and their personal respect above all else.
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