Tamela and David Mann: 30 Years of Love and Laughter

Guideposts Video: Inspiring True Stories

Tamela Mann: Hello Guideposts. I’m Tamela Mann. I’m a Christian artist, gospel artist. I have a Grammy award, Dove awards. Most of all, I’m a servant. I’m a grandmother, a wife, mother.

David Mann: Hello Guideposts. And I’m David Mann, comedian, actor, producer, director, singer—most of all, husband, father, grandfather. We’re going to take you on our 30-year journey, the ups, the downs, the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between.

TM: When we first met, actually, we were teenagers. We were in high school.

DM: 19, young and tender.

TM: My classmate had a class with David and introduced us, wanted me to come sing for them because he was singing in a group. We kind of start running into each other. And then, eventually, it wasn’t long after I started singing with him and the guys.

DM: But, you know, that started our journey of friendship, and which our whole relationship and our whole foundation of everything that we are as a couple is based on our friendship.

TM: Yes.

DM: And the reason that that was so important for us is because that base helped us get through a lot of the ups and downs in our marriage. And I always tell—as we were writing the book, I told her, “If we hadn’t been friends, we probably wouldn’t have…”

TM: You don’t think we would have made it?

DM: I don’t think we would have been together. We’ve learned to laugh at some of the dumb stuff, as I would call it. I mean, some stuff is just really not worth it, especially we talk about the art of arguing in the book is we stick with the issue. That there’s times when you can get going with an argument, and it just becomes—you’re arguing about one thing, and next thing you know, it’s about 10 different things. And those are rules that we set in our marriage like, look, let’s just stick with the issue.

TM: Right.

DM: And know that there’s some unresolved stuff. We’ll get to those later. But right now in the heat of t this argument, we have to stick with this issues.

TM: It’s not that you’re just arguing, but when you do have a disagreement, you want to get an understanding about what it is that maybe is causing a problem. Maybe I’m coming at you the wrong way and not saying it. Because a lot of times, it’s not…

DM: You would never come at me the wrong way. [chuckles]

TM: It’s probably not what we’re saying, but it’s how we’re saying it to each other.

DM: But our faith and our foundation is what has gotten us through, like, everything in life.

TM: We pray together, but not on a daily basis. I usually say a daily prayer where I’m just…

DM: Or a daily devotional.

TM: Especially, like, work or whatever we’re doing, we always ask the Lord if that’s our steps that we need to be taking, if our steps are being ordered by him, if this is the…

DM: Place that we need to be.

TM: Or business that we need to engage in or the personal we need to work with. It’s like the Lord is always in everything.

DM: So we have a full 30 years of…

TM: Our journey.

DM: Love, life, laughter, family, our blended family. And we wanted to put it in a book. So we wrote the book Us Against the World.

TM: Us Against the World: Our Secrets to Love, Marriage, and Family. It’s all about families staying together and no matter what, not quit and give up on each other. That’s our goal is to reach and to help and encourage other families. That’s what it’s all about.

It’s not about fame and fortune for us, but for other people to be just as happy as we are in our relationship with theirs and their families.

I finally got David in the studio to sing with me after all these years of singing with us together as a couple. And it was a lot of fun. But these songs are talking about each other and our journey, our love for each other. And again, just nice, good, clean love music.

Our single now is entitled Good Love, and it’s talking about that you have to communicate and listen to one another.

DM: And sometimes, we want to—oh, you wanted to sing.

TM: You want to sing something?

DM: Go.

[singing together) Good love, good love, sometimes we get stuck on our own outlook. Good love, to have it this way you must listen, communicate and listen to one another.

DM: And so that’s Good Love. And it just talk about your communication.

TM: So you can download that as well at any digital outlets. But it’s really been a blessing, the 30 years, how we’ve built our careers together. And it’s all been by the help of the Lord and our faith in God and us being faithful to God. God has been faithful to us. And that’s really all I can say, that if it happened for us, it can happen for you.