Today is our 48th wedding anniversary. WTF. Crazy, right?!?
Oh, and if you're doing the math at home: 17,520 One Days at a Time... 🤣
A Happy Marriage, One Gesture at a Time by Susan Semenak
"Really great marriages are not the result of long hours of hard work, but of everyday behaviours and attitudes, seemingly small gestures that show your spouse that he or she is noticed, appreciated, respected, loved and desired," Orbuch writes in her just-published book 5 Simple Steps to Take Your Marriage from Good to Great (Delacorte Press), which is based on the study's findings.
MONTREAL – What makes couples happy? What makes marriages last? It's the small stuff, it turns out: Telling him he looks great in his jeans. Bringing her coffee in bed in the morning. Sneaking off without the kids from time to time. Taking turns doing the laundry.
Terri Orbuch, a Michigan-based research professor and marriage- and-family therapist, spent more than 22 years charting the love lives of 373 married couples in the U.S. government-funded Early Years of Marriage Project, the longest-running study of marriage conducted in North America.
The secrets of happy couples, Orbuch and her team of researchers found, were surprisingly simple.
"Really great marriages are not the result of long hours of hard work, but of everyday behaviours and attitudes, seemingly small gestures that show your spouse that he or she is noticed, appreciated, respected, loved and desired," Orbuch writes in her just-published book 5 Simple Steps to Take Your Marriage from Good to Great (Delacorte Press), which is based on the study's findings.
When couples in solid relationships run into trouble, or experience "the blahs," they often focus on what's wrong, as do many self-help books and marriage counsellors, Orbuch said in a telephone interview this week. But she found focusing on their strengths and taking a few minutes every day "to fix the little things" had a greater impact on happiness.
"It's not those big challenges that couples experience that eat away at happiness so much as the seemingly minor issues that accumulate over the years," Orbuch said. "We're so busy with work and family and exercise and shovelling snow and doing the groceries that people too often put their relationships on the backburner." Here are a few of the secrets Orbuch gleaned from happy couples for making a good marriage great:
BOOK: What Makes a Marriage Last: 40 Celebrated Couples Share with Us the Secrets to a Happy Life by Marlo Thomas, Phil Donahue
POEM(S): New Vows by Sierra DeMulder
When my best friend got married,
he walked down the aisle to a song
about death. Isn’t that what marriage is
all about? he laughed. A promise
to be together until one of you dies?
I regret my wedding vows, too focused
on the benign—our boundless laughter,
how I cherish just waking up together.
I should have said, I take thee and all
the treachery that aliveness guarantees.
I should have said, I will help bury
your elders. I take your hand and your heart
murmur; the cancerous growth above
your father’s ear. I take your family
history of alcoholism and give you back
a possible covenant of dementia, miscarriage,
high blood pressure. In sickness and in
car accidents. In sickness and in the mundane.
Shared calendars and anniversaries spent
arguing about our budget. You told me once
Great Danes have a short life expectancy,
only 6-10 years if you’re lucky, and I cried:
who would sign up to love something
so impermanent? O, beloved, we have
been so happy lately, it’s making us nervous.
And isn’t that what marriage is all about:
a love so darling, so hallowed and exposed,
we both volunteer to be its keeper—when
the joy runs dry, when the body fails—
not because but in glorious spite of
the unpalatable, impossible fact that
someday one of us will wake up first
only to find ourselves alone.
Me First by Billy Collins
We often fly in the sky together,
and we’re always okay—there’s our luggage now
waiting for us on the carousel.
And we drive lots of places
in all manner of hectic traffic,
yet here we are pulling in the driveway again.
So many opportunities to die together,
but no meteor has hit our house,
no tornado has lifted us into its funnel.
The odds say then that one of us will go
before the other, like heading off
into a heavy snow storm, leaving
the other one behind to stand in the kitchen
or lie on the bed under the fan.
So why not let me, the older one, go first?
I don’t want to see you everywhere
as I wait for the snow to stop,
before setting out with a crooked stick, calling your name.
Habitation by Margaret Atwood
Marriage is not
a house or even a tent
it is before that, and colder:
the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn
the edge of the receding glacier
where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far
we are learning to make fire
Marriage by Ellen Bass
When you finally, after deep illness, lay
the length of your body on mine, isn’t it
like the strata of the earth, the pressure
of time on sand, mud, bits of shell, all
the years, uncountable wakings, sleepings,
sleepless nights, fights, ordinary mornings
talking about nothing, and the brief
fiery plummets, and the unselfconscious
silences of animals grazing, the moving
water, wind, ice that carries the minutes, leaves
behind minerals that bind the sediment into rock.
How to bear the weight, with every
flake of bone pressed in. Then, how to bear when
the weight is gone, the way a woman
whose neck has been coiled with brass
can no longer hold it up alone. Oh love,
it is balm, but also a seal. It binds us tight
as the fur of a rabbit to the rabbit.
When you strip it, grasping the edge
of the sliced skin, pulling the glossy membranes
apart, the body is warm and limp. If you could,
you’d climb inside that wet, slick skin
and carry it on your back. This is not
neat and white and lacy like a wedding,
not the bright effervescence of champagne
spilling over the throat of the bottle. This visceral
bloody union that is love, but
beyond love. Beyond charm and delight
the way you to yourself are past charm and delight.
This is the shucked meat of love, the alleys and broken
glass of love, the petals torn off the branches of love,
the dizzy hoarse cry, the stubborn hunger.
QUOTE(S): “Marriage is not a noun; it’s a verb. It isn’t something you get. It’s something you do. It’s the way you love your partner every day.” ~ Barbara De Angelis
"Basically the secret to a long-lasting marriage is memory loss and well-meaning lies and beach margaritas." ~ Jenny Lawson
