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“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.” – Robert Browning
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My wife and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. Yesterday!
50 years is a long time!
A little over 50 years ago, I asked the person who would become my wife to marry me. In what many would say was a lack of good judgment, she said yes.
We fast-forward about eight months to our wedding day. I was wearing a white tuxedo with white shoes. My hair is long and touches the collar of my shirt. I was wearing large eyeglasses, similar to Mr Peabody’s friend Sherman (for those of you unfamiliar you would have to search the Rocky and Bullwinkle show). In retrospect, I looked like I was headlining a John Denver tribute show. I still had my two hardest years of dental school remaining. The prospect of successfully graduating dental school was still uncertain. I had no job, no house, and no money! In poker terms, I had very few chips on the table!
I looked my soon-to-be wife in the eyes and said “I can’t promise that we’ll ever be rich, and I can’t promise that we’ll ever be famous. I can promise that if you marry me, you’ll live an interesting life”. It’s been 50 years, and I think I’ve delivered on my promise. The funny thing is, we’ve also become rich along the way. I’m not speaking about net worth, although that has increased. Since our net worth when we got married was basically zero, saying my net worth increased is not a hard hill to climb! The riches I speak about come from the fact that we now have three beautiful children, two beautiful daughters-in-law, and a beautiful son-in-law. We also have five beautiful grandchildren. We also have a group of close friends that have allowed us to share in their lives.
So, we are, in fact, rich!
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50 years is a long time to coast on promises. This blog discusses how to keep your marriage intact for 50 years. George Clooney has repeatedly stated that he and his wife, Amal Clooney, have never had an argument or a fight in over 11 years of marriage. I can’t say that I’ve spent much time with George and Amal Clooney. In fact, I’ve spent zero time with them. So I can’t verify or discredit their statement. Maybe they are the one married couple in the whole world that has never had one disagreement in 11 years of marriage.
But, I do know from experience that a healthy marriage isn’t maintained by avoiding problems—it’s maintained by walking life together.
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Here are some important marriage lessons:
- Keep communicating – Talk regularly about money, family, plans, worries, and feelings. Don’t let important issues build up. In today’s fast-paced world, it’s hard to carve out time for meaningful conversations. Sometimes it seems easier to ignore a problem than to address it. Burying a problem doesn’t solve it. It only avoids it. It sounds lame, but my wife and I used to sit on the sofa and hold hands when discussing problems.
- Show gratitude– acknowledge what you are grateful for in your marriage. Regularly tell your spouse what you value about them. Small compliments can have a surprisingly large effect. After being married for a long time, couples tend to forget what brought them together in the first place. Go back to those early years and remember what you valued in your spouse earlier in your marriage.
- Make time for each other – Don’t allow work, phones, hobbies, children, or retirement activities to replace time spent together.
- Protect your friendship – My wife, and I dated for several years before we were married. Our relationship started as a friendship and became a fifty-year marriage. We always like to say we became friends before we fell in love with each other. Laugh together, share interests, take trips, eat together, and continue to be curious about each other.
- Handle disagreements respectfully – Avoid insults, contempt, threats, and keeping score. The goal of disagreements should be to resolve the problem. Winning an argument doesn’t advance the relationship. We live in a society where everyone wants to be a winner. It’s hard to discuss a disagreement while remaining neutral. The worst thing that can happen is to take a disagreement and turn it into a personal attack!
- Learn to apologize and forgive – If a disagreement becomes personal, a sincere “I was wrong” is powerful. Forgiveness doesn’t mean pretending something didn’t happen; it means choosing not to punish each other for it. In the movie Love Story, there is a famous line: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”. Even the lead actress in the movie, Ali McGraw said it was the dumbest line she ever heard. It may have been a great catch line in the movie, but it doesn’t work in real life.
- Maintain physical affection and intimacy – Holding hands, hugging, kissing, and sexual intimacy all help maintain connection. Talk openly about each other’s needs.
- Be a team financially – Most couples will agree that over time one person usually becomes the financial driver and does most of the heavy lifting. But it is still important that both parties agree on major spending, saving, investing, retirement, and helping family. Money problems are often relationship problems in disguise.
- Give each other some independence – A healthy marriage allows both people to have individual friends, interests, hobbies, and time alone. This can be a major stumbling block for retirees. People who spent the majority of each working day apart are now together 24/7. Each spouse must maintain some individual interests. When spouses do things apart, it creates topics of conversation when they are together.
- Support each other’s goals – Your spouse should feel that you are genuinely interested in their happiness and personal growth. Even though my spouse supports the Retiring With Enough podcast, she doesn’t listen to it. She says that she hears it organically through our daily conversations.
- Deal with problems early – Don’t assume resentment will disappear on its own. Small unresolved issues can become major ones.
- Keep dating each other – Even after decades together, intentionally create occasions that feel different from ordinary daily life. Throughout our marriage, I tried to create little surprise events. Sometimes bringing home fresh flowers, or even a single rose. Spontaneous date nights, nights out, or by purchasing some small item she desired
- Be dependable – Trust grows when your words and actions consistently match. Keep promises and be someone your spouse can count on. Dependability and consistency cannot be understated!
- Continue learning about each other – People change over the years. Don’t assume you already know everything about your spouse. One of the most important things that I’ve learned over the years is that my wife and I have different ways of displaying our love for each other. What I think is an important way of displaying my love for her may not seem important to her, and vice versa. How love is displayed is less important than understanding that your spouse is showing you love!
- Have a shared vision for the future – Especially later in life, discuss what you want the next 5, 10, or 20 years to look like—travel, family, retirement, finances, health, and purpose.
- It’s not all about you- when you decide to get married, you give up a part of your individuality to become part of a two-person union. This also signals the period when everything is considered from an individual viewpoint. Considerations now stem from how it affects both of you, not you individually. If you continue to consider only yourself, eventually, you’ll be back to having only yourself to consider!
- Compromise- the second part of it not being all about you is that decisions must be considered with a compromise in mind. Because there are now two people with differing opinions, not every decision between two people is automatically in sync. Compromise means that neither person gets everything they want. Each person gets some of the things they desire, but not everything.
- It’s never all good, and it’s never all bad- when my wife and I hit rough spots in our marriage, and there have been a few, I always try to remember that it is never going to be all good, and it’s never going to be all bad. I know that if we hang on, things will get better. Eventually things do get better!
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Final Thoughts
Your spouse should generally feel better, safer, and more loved because they are married to you.
My top five lessons are: Respect + Communication + Friendship + Affection + Shared Purpose
There is one question worth asking each other periodically: “What made me fall in love with my spouse?” That question can open a much more productive conversation than asking, “What’s wrong with our marriage?”
It’s never all good, and it’s never all bad. If you hang on just a bit, things should get better. It doesn’t happen magically. Each person in the marriage must work on the marriage. The willingness to continue to work on a stronger marriage is what makes partnership, consistency, and dependability important.
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