According to the poet Tennyson, “in the spring a young man’s (and woman’s)  fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”  So  here’s another post on our elders’ asvice on marriage.

When it comes to selecting a life partner, the elders we interviewed had one very strong suggestion: Marry someone a lot like you. Opposites may attract, they told us, but they don’t necessarily make for lasting relationshps. And most important is shared values.

April Stern,71, and her husband, Steve, were married for 47 years, until Steve’s death. April is a highly respected community leader who directed several local organizations, and Steve was a well-known local psychotherapist. They were deeply in love throughout their long relationship. “I think we modeled a good marriage, our children even talked about that as being important to them,” says April.

It sounds simple, but you have to like each other. Be friends, try to get past the initial heaving and panting, and make sure there’s a real friendship underneath that. I don’t think you have to have identical interests, but you’ve got to have shared values. That is quite important. That was critical. Yeah, I think values are probably the most important thing.

And we both loved certain kinds of things. We both loved movies, good movies, and part of our courtship involved staying up all night and figuring out what an Ingmar Bergman film really meant. We both loved to read, and we loved to talk about what we’d read.

A similar sense of humor — that was a very important part of our life together. In fact, just two weeks before he died, we were talking one night, and he said something and I just dissolved in laughter, and he looked at me so self-satisfied and said, ‘I can still make you laugh after all these years!’ And he could.