A Bond That Time Enriches : Relationships: Does marriage <i> really </i> improve with age? A new study says yes. Successful couples learn to read signals and communicate.
Clearly, the couple in their 60s had traveled this conversational road before. You should be more aggressive in pursuing your mother’s inheritance, the husband told his wife. That’s real money and you’re entitled to your share of it, he pressed. Besides, there’s that gold-digging sister of yours, and if you don’t watch out, she’ll walk off with every single cent. . . .
“Robert!” interrupted the wife, who at this point had had enough.
End of discussion.
For the three social scientists analyzing the videotape of this small colloquy, the exchange was illuminating. The man and woman were among 156 Bay Area couples in their 40s and 60s studied over a six-year period to assess emotional interaction in long-term marriages.
The conclusions reached by psychologists Robert W. Levenson of the University of California, Berkeley and John M. Gottman of the University of Washington, and gerontologist Laura L. Carstensen of Stanford University gave the lie to traditional expectations that marriage deadens emotionally with age. On the contrary, the researchers found that where feelings are concerned, marriage ages well. Couples in long-term marriages in fact grow happier with age, learning better to express their emotions and to navigate the temperamental terrain of their partnerships.
“These are the victors in the marital marathon,” said Levenson, who noted that among the older couples, the average duration of marriage was about 45 years. “There is an emotional virtuosity about these couples.”
So masterful is their emotional reciprocity, Levenson said, that they may well demonstrate a new dimension of an old truism. Maybe, Levenson said, “Emotion is like everything else. If you use it, you don’t lose it.”
Levenson and Gottman, widely known for their research on marriage, joined with Carstensen to undertake the study because earlier investigations had placed such emphasis on what makes marriages fail. This line of inquiry has no doubt been productive, since data from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics confirm that for the last 20 years, half as many Americans have gotten divorced as have gotten married. Still, to Gottman, Levenson and Carstensen, it seemed equally beneficial to examine the qualities that enable partners in long-term marriages to remain together.
In both middle-aged and older categories, all the participants were in first marriages. Gottman said the sampling was demographically diverse and varied in levels of marital satisfaction. The middle-aged couples were required to be married at least 15 years, with an older spouse between 40 and 50 years of age. Older couples had to be married at least 35 years, with older spouses between 60 and 70. A grant from the American Assn. of Retired Persons helped fund the research, for which participants received a small stipend.
A rapidly aging U.S. population was an additional impetus.
“We really don’t know much about what marriage is like in old age,” Levenson said. Cultural stereotypes portray aging married people as dull and decrepit, he said, adding: “About the only thing that anyone has said increases with age is this elusive quality called wisdom.”
But far from emotional ossification, Levenson and his colleagues encountered “an interesting shift toward greater expression of positive emotion. The piece of (that) pie gets larger,” said Levenson, as older couples succeed in limiting negative exchanges without losing depth of communication or feeling.
Lifelessness is not an automatic consequence, they found. “These couples are fun and vibrant. They have an affirming, upbeat quality,” Levenson said.
Their marriages are often emotionally volatile, Gottman said. “They get mad at each other. They are very forthright. But they are also tender.”
This emotional expertise turns out to be a sort of silver lining in what has often been seen as the cloud of aging. Unlike their middle-aged counterparts, older couples often have learned to temper criticism with an affectionate remark at just the right moment.
A wife in her 40s, for example, might inform her same-age husband that “you make me crazy when you stare into space when I’m talking.” A common response from the husband would be: “I might do that, but you don’t give me an inch. Every time I try to say something you cut me off. Pretty soon I drift off. What do you expect?”
For middle-aged couples, escalation is the norm. But in older couples, the wife would probably deflect the emotional barb with an affectionate remark: “You might look off into space, but I know your heart’s in the right place.”
Many older husbands turned out to be highly attuned to their wives’ feelings--particularly anger.
Unlike the middle-aged married men in this study, “They don’t stonewall it,” Gottman said. “They don’t fight back. They take it in, and they take it seriously.”
So for the older couples, Gottman and his colleagues found, rather than becoming a destructive force, anger served as “a way of italicizing (their) complaint, a way of saying, ‘Hey, this is important--and you need to take it seriously.’ ”
The older couples also drew on what Levenson termed “an emotional scrapbook,” the wealth of memories built from a long history together. The struggles they have had and the camaraderie became “a kind of bank account they can draw on,” Levenson said.
While nowhere close to sitting in rocking chairs and remembering when, the older couples do sometime review their pasts as a ballast for the present. Gottman described one such couple, still coming to terms with a long-ago life decision.
He: “You’re saying we would have had a much better marriage if we hadn’t had children.”
She: “Absolutely. What a great marriage we would have had if you hadn’t turned me into a drudge.”
He: “It’s a biological need to have children.”
She: “There you go, reducing me to biology.”
He: “Name me one good marriage where they didn’t have children.”
She: “The Duke and Duchess of Windsor.”
He: “You got me there.”
What Gottman observed in this couple, and in others exhibiting similar traits, was “a sense of volatility to their debate. They like to scrap, but they also have a lot of respect for one another.”
All of which helps to refute what Marin County psychologist Judith S. Wallerstein, co-author of the new book “The Good Marriage” (Houghton Mifflin), characterized as “a very jaundiced view of marriage.” She said the prevalence of divorce had led to “a lot of misapprehensions about marriage.”
On the other hand, Wallerstein said, “I think there has never been serious doubt in this society that marriage will endure as an institution. The issue is that marriage is very stressed; it is hard to do. What’s comforting about this study--and mine--is that there are people who are doing it well.”
