Love Ages Well, Researchers Learn : Science: UC Berkeley psychologists find that couples in long-term marriages become happier as they grow older, learning to express more affection and defusing conflicts with humor.

University research reveals something our grandparents may already have known: Old love really is the best love.

The observational studies conducted by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, found that couples in long-term marriages become happier as they age, learning to express more affection.

The cheering finding surprised researchers.

“What we actually thought we would see is a kind of a fatigue quality in these relationships. But that’s not what we see. They’re vibrant, they’re alive, they’re emotional, they’re fun, they’re sexy, they’re not burned out,” said UC Berkeley psychology professor Robert W. Levenson.

The findings wouldn’t be any surprise to Robert Browning, who long ago invited his love to “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.”

But they do fly in the face of the mythology of modern romance, which is crammed with songs, novels and movies extolling the joys of young, even puppy, love.

“The general theme in most research on aging is that of a lessening and diminution,” said Levenson, who, along with two colleagues, published a paper on the research in a recent issue of the journal Psychology and Aging.

“Going into it, I think our best bet would have been marriages would have become less emotional and less affectionate and maybe less lively and vibrant, and that’s not what we found.”

The research has been carried out since 1989 with 156 couples who live in the east San Francisco Bay area. One group of couples consists of people in their 60s who have been married for at least 15 years and the other of people in their 40s who had been married the same period of time.

Researchers interviewed the couples in their homes and also brought them into a laboratory setting, where they were hooked up to equipment measuring their reactions.

For the lab sessions, couples were asked to bring up an area of conflict and talk about it. Researchers found that older couples didn’t have duller emotions than their younger counterparts, but they were less negative and more affectionate.

For instance, a couple talking about a communication problem while researchers listened might have an exchange in which the wife complained that her husband stared into space while she talked and the husband retorted that every time he tried to say something he was cut off.

At that point, the middle-aged couples were likely to escalate the fight, with the wife saying, “Well, you don’t listen either!” Levenson said.

In the older couples, however, the wife might defuse the conflict by saying something like, “You might look off into space, but I know your heart’s in the right place.”

Younger couples resorted to humor, too, but it tended to be of a cutting nature that hurt, not healed. Their other coping mechanism was to stop talking altogether, a method used more often by men than women.

UC Berkeley psychology professor Phil Cowan said the findings made sense to him, “given that I’m 57 and I’ve been married for 35 years.

“If you last that long, then I think you’re looking at a group of people who have found a way to live together,” he said.

Levenson theorizes that the happier older marriages are probably due to a combination of getting smarter and more mellow.

“One of the things these couples tell us over and over again is they’ve had hard times both in their marriages and their lives and somehow that struggle has brought them closer together.”

That’s good news for couples trying to cope with the stresses of married life, Levenson said.

“If you can navigate those in a thoughtful and constructive way, at the end relationships just seem to get better and better, and that is a pretty optimistic statement.”