FAIRHOPE, Ala. — Izzy is from Georgia, Janette from Mississippi.

“Alabama was a compromise,” Izzy Pike said Monday. “It’s just like marriage.”

The Pikes, who will celebrate their 44th wedding anniversary Feb. 28, retired to Fairhope about three years ago.

“Compromise and humor is what we decided you need to have,”Janette Pike said. “We talked about this.”

Those are important ingredients of a successful marriage, they both agreed.

“Long-married couples are not the norm,” said Duke Martin, oncology chaplain at Brookwood Medical Center in Birmingham, who married the Pikes’ two daughters. “My wife and I have also been married 44 years. You have to learn to give and take. People can’t believe we’ve been married that long. But that’s the way it ought to be. Janette and Izzy are wonderful people and wonderful parents. They are to be commended.”

Compromise and having a sense of humor may be two of the things that Janette and Izzy believe are essential to having a long marriage, but those came later.

“We met and married in five months,” Janette said.

While Janette leaned forward and talked with her hands gesturing, Izzy leaned back with his hands behind his head.

She is animated, he more reserved.

“I’m definitely the more optimistic, he’s more organized.”

He thinks about that.

“It’s humor, but it’s also basic respect for each other that’s important.”

She tries to finish his sentence. He waits, then goes on.

“We started our life together with her as my boss,” he said, explaining how he was a freshman medical student at Emory University, while she was a graduate student in medical technology and ran a lab where he worked.

“That’s right,” she said.

He remembers the first time he saw her.

“She was cute,” he said. “She is still very cute.”

She laughs.

“I have a mental image of what she looked like in her white uniform.”

“And in my blocky white shoes,” she added.

“Obviously, I was impressed with her science background. But it was those striking green eyes.”

They look at each other for a second.

“I can close my eyes and see her standing there,” he said. “She was cute; she was funny; and she was smart.”

“Boy, I’m impressed,” she said.

They look at each a few more seconds.

“He was very sexy,” she said. “And I thought he might even be as smart as me.”

They laugh.

After Izzy graduated medical school, while she worked to help get him through, he became an oncologist and they lived in North Carolina and New Jersey. He also worked in medical research.

They had two daughters, Julie and Jill, who live near each other now in northern Virginia, both married to attorneys. Julie has two children, Lela, 5, and William, 3.

While working in Princeton, N.J., they started thinking of places to retire and looked in a number of Southern states. They also bought a condominium in Orange Beach in the 1990s and fell in love with the area.

They moved to Fairhope about three years ago.

“They exhibit so much romance now,” said Janette’s sister, Patsy Clark Pace of Iuka, Miss, who is Mississippi’s Poet of the Year for 2008. “He’s always been very busy. When you have a doctor husband, you have to be a special person.”

Janette said their criteria for a retirement home was a place where you could walk into a small town and have something to do there.

“We love it here,” she said.

Recently, some young neighbors stopped by on a scavenger hunt needing a picture of a couple married over 30 years. He had to kneel and sing to her while they took a picture.

“I’ll kneel but no song,” Izzy said he told them.

Izzy will turn 65 on Feb. 24.

Janette, 67, explains they waited for Feb. 28 in 1964 to get married, until Izzy was 21.

“We didn’t want to get into a debate with our families over our marriage,” she said, explaining there were a few obstacles they had to cross but that eventually everything worked out.

She summarized it this way.

“He’s very lucky I married him,” she said.

“I agree,” he said.

“And that I’m still married to him.”

“That too,” Izzy said.