Category Archives: Love and Marriage

“Laugh at Yourself” – Our Grand Prize Winning Lesson from Young Person

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Rachel Dawson won our grand prize in the Legacy Project contest for younger people, who offered a lesson they’ve learned from an elder in our lives. She tells about grandparents with a great sense of humor!

Immediately after graduate school, I had the opportunity to live with my grandparents for a year while I completed an exciting but low-paying internship. Although they lived very simply, they were incredibly happy people — both were in their mid-80s and had been married for 61 years at the time.

 In late 2006 and early 2007, one of the biggest cable news network headlines was the paternity of Anna Nicole Smith’s daughter. One morning, I overheard my grandfather shouting to my grandmother “Grandma! GRANDMA! I have something to tell you!” She asked, “What is it, Bob?” He replied, “I’m really sorry…I’m the father of Anna Nicole’s baby!”

At that moment, it was apparent to me that their individual and shared sense of humor had played a significant role in the longevity of their marriage and their six decades of happiness. Rarely had they taken themselves or life too seriously.

I learned a lot that year during my internship, but the most valuable lesson came from them: cultivating the ability to laugh at ourselves and poke good-natured fun at each other is key to weathering the rough times and building a strong, happy life and relationship.

Marriage Advice: Find Someone a Lot Like You

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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.

“Ask Amy” Readers Discuss “30 Lessons” and Marriage

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I love reading the daily lessons from the wonderful nationally-syndicated advice columnist Amy Dickinson – “Ask Amy.” Amy printed a Valentine’s day column on the lessons for marriage in my book 30 Lessons for Living, that offered five tips from America’s elders for happy married life.

But it didn’t end there. Readers of this column (that appears in more than 400 newspapers) began to add their own lessons for marriage. In today’s column, there’s a wonderful list that I’d like to share with you – right in line with the elders in my book.

Dear Amy: I just had to offer a comment regarding your column that appeared on Valentine’s Day — the letter from Karl Pillemer of Cornell University regarding the secrets to a long, happy marriage.

I feel qualified to weigh in on this topic; my husband and I marked our 50th anniversary a few months ago. We actually met at age 14, in ninth-grade homeroom, and have been together ever since.

We feel truly fortunate to have found each other at such a tender age and to have had such a good run.

It was as if Mr. Pillemer had held a mirror up to our life.

We have talked many times about the importance of having the same core values, being friends first and lovers second, and never holding grudges.

Item No. 4 — talk to each other — has been a critical and valued part of our long relationship.

If we were to make any additions to the list, it would be the importance of a sense of humor.

Being able to laugh is essential — first at ourselves, and then at the absurdities of our everyday world.

We also try to always be aware of the needs of others and to be generous with our resources and our time.

Granted, life is not always perfect. But we know we are blessed.

The strength of our relationship has seen us through those “inevitable rough patches.”

We are grateful for each day together and do our best to spend them wisely.

Keep an eye on the “Ask Amy” column – more lessons may be coming!

Don’t Rush into Marriage

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The elders have seen many people rush into marriage – and they believe that’s a big mistake. They exhort us to think twice, three times, or however many times it takes before you take the step into marriage. Investigate it more thoroughly than any other decision, weigh your options, and in particular examine your motives. If you are doing it for the wrong reasons, you have every reason to wait.

Henry, 82, told me:

I don’t know what set of rules or guidelines to use to ascertain who is the best life partner for you, but don’t be hasty, take your time. Let the partner know you’re taking your time. Invite the partner also to take his or her time. Don’t be hasty, try to avoid pitfalls down the road.

If you take your time you can at least be somewhat surer of selecting a life mate correctly and not capriciously. This can let you avoid the business of divorce or separation – divorce is a very unpleasant process. So try to be very selective in your life partner early on and avoid if possible the trauma and the unpleasantness associated with divorce.

Roxanne, 74, urges people to fight the urge to get married just because “everyone else is doing it”:

Of course, you have to pick the right person. When I married my husband he was – well I just felt there was nobody like him. And I wanted to feel that way the rest of my life. Because of the way I felt about him, I wanted to be a good wife, good mother, good grandmother, and so far God has allowed me to be that. I just think you have to have a lot of love, true love. But what a lot of young people don’t know these days is what true love is and what commitment is. And when they say, “I do,” what it is they are really saying? Younger people think they have to get married because somebody else got married, one of their friends got married, or whatever. That’s not what it’s all about. And that is a serious mistake.

Rushing to quickly into marriage was one of the major regrets expressed by the elders in 30 Lessons for Living. So it’s worth thinking twice (or more) before saying “I do!”

Looking for Love? Look Beyond Appearances

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I visited Agnes, 87, in the bright sunroom of her assisted living facility. She sat upright at the table, immaculately dressed, and warmly welcomed me. I learned not to be fooled by the prim exterior. Agnes is a risk-taker and believes in living life to the fullest. Her family did not have enough money to send her to college, so she went to work as a telphone operator.

 Then, on an impulse, she decided to become an airplane pilot, so that she could serve in the Women’s Airforce Service. The WAS was just being organized at that time to allow women to fly non-combat missions (and thus free up men to fly in combat). She received her license and underwent extensive training, but, the war ended before she was called up (“I cried!,” she told me).

Around this time, however, John came into the picture. Here’s Agnes’s story:

John lived around the corner from me, him and his family did, and there was one sister that I associated with, like that. And I used to go up to the house and I’d tease him even though he was six years older than we were. So we sort of grew up together.

Well, I used to go with a fellow right after  high school, name of Bob. And Bob calls me one night, and says “I can’t go to the dance tonight with you. I’ve got the measles.”  Well, I really wanted to go, and I didn’t want to go alone because it was formal and I thought, “What on earth am I going to do?” And then I said to myself:  “I’m going to ask John.” I don’t know why, but I did.  And I went up and said, “Bob’s got the measles and he can’t go to the dance, will you go with me?”  And John says, “Sure.”  We went out, had a wonderful time, and that was the start of it.

Then one day John shows up at the air field and I said, “What are you doing down here? You know you’re not supposed to come here.”  And he said, “I’m just making sure you’re enjoying yourself.”  So one of the flying instructors was there and he said to me, “Take him up.” So we went up, and then John helped me clean up the plane. Then John heads down to the instructor and right in front of me he says, “When do I start taking lessons?” Right then and there! His mother was his first passenger. That day pretty much sealed it for us.

He was an honest man, and humble. He had an injured right hand because he was burned as a baby. He could not go into WW II because of his hand. And some of the girls would say to me, “How could you go out with him with a hand like that?”  I said, “I don’t look at the hand. I look at him and he’s a good man.”  John was very calm, I’m the hyper type, and he was soothing. I’d get mad – one time I threw a dish because I was so mad at him so he picked another dish out of the cupboard and handed it to me and said, “Here, do you want another one?” 

Oh, he was a good man!

Elder Wisdom: Where’s the Sex?

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A few days ago, I received a very interesting inquiry from Jo Giese. You may have heard of Jo, who is a noted author and journalist. Her remarkable and moving caregiving story on This American Life made an impression on many people.

Jo raised a point that I must admit stopped me in my tracks – one of those head-smacking moments where you ask yourself: “Why didn’t I think of that?”  She wrote:

I saw you interviewed on TV and got your book.  I’m enjoying it and look forward to giving it to my 96-year-old mother, who could very easily have been one of your experts.

However, I was disappointed in one huge omission:  the discussion of sexuality and aging.  If folks are nervous about aging and death, they are also often nervous about the potential loss of sexuality as they age.  However, studies show that as long as people have a partner they can continue to have a satisfactory, if different from when they were younger, sexual life.

Jo is of course absolutely right. Research evidence summarized by the American Psychological Association demonstrates that sex by no means “stops at 60,” and that many elders remain sexually interested and engaged throughout their lives. As the National Institute on Aging puts it: “Many people want and need to be close to others as they grow older. This includes the desire to continue an active, satisfying sex life as they grow older.”

So: Why doesn’t the issue show up in the Legacy Project interviews, and in my book, 30 Lessons for Living, based on the 1200 elders in the project? I’ve been pondering that question since receiving Jo’s message, and maybe you readers can help me.

In doing the interviews and writing the book, I was committed to letting the elders drive the process. In our initial pilot studies, we asked people in an open-ended way for their lessons. Then we took those themes, and used them to guide the surveys we conducted.

And sex – as part of a lesson for living or advice for the young – just didn’t come up. It didn’t make the top 30 list of lessons to pass on to future generations. In fact, it didn’t make any list at all. When it came up, it was often downgraded in importance. For example, when Stanley, 84, was considering a second marriage, he told me that he wanted someone who was “touchy – someone who isn’t afraid to be touched and to touch back. I’m not talking about sex; I’m talking about affection.”

When I asked: “What advice would you give for finding a mate and staying married” only a handful of people mentioned sexual compatibility or a good sex life, and typically it was at the end of the list that included sharing similar values, liking one another’s family, communicating, and not “keeping score” in the relationship.

So why no sex? The topic is striking in its absence.

One hypothesis might be that the topic was too sensitive, but I don’t think so. The elders were certainly honest about everything else! They talked about severe marital problems, betrayal, and divorce. The also opened up about their financial situations, about child-rearing problems, and about death (considered to be another highly taboo topic). I would add that one of our interviewers was a woman in her late sixties, with whom older women would presumably feel comfortable – and they didn’t mention sexuality in their life lessons to her, either.

A second possibility is that sexuality in this generation is more “taken for granted” and treated less as a problem to be solved than it is in contemporary culture.

Or third, people may simply have felt that this was not a topic on which they had concrete advice to share. It may not have seemed to be an issue on which they could advise the young. Or at their stage of life, the benefits of companionship and friendship in marriage are more salient, and so they highlighted these themes.

Readers: I need your help. Any thoughts on why, among so many topics, the hundreds of elders we interviewed did not include sexuality in their advice for future generations? Please weigh in! Take a look at the comments below – do you agree?

 

 

Great Advice for Marriage and Child-Rearing: New Video of Ruth, 95

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What do you learn over 95 years of living? Ruth is an inspiring example of what we learn from our own experiences that we can pass on.

One interesting finding of the Legacy Project (described in the book 30 Lessons for Living) is that most elders did not endorse corporal punishment of children; Ruth tells you why. She also offers tips for a happy marriage.