Golden Couples

When the topic of marriage hits the headlines, it is likely to surround the redefinition of marriage, the high divorce rate, the cultural trend to cohabitate rather than to wed, or the latest Hollywood couple to tie the knot. But the headlines here in Ashland County this coming week should read, “In Celebration of Marriage,” for that’s what happening in our community. Under the banner of United Way of Ashland County and the Ashland County Community Foundation, couples married fifty years or more are being honored for that accomplishment as the Ashland gold carpet is rolled out on October 16^th. Can you believe it - they have reservations for one hundred and eighty-eight couples. That is absolutely amazing!

Fifty years is a long, long time to be married. Waking up to each other more than eighteen thousand times, bed head and all. The “five hundred- twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes” from Rent’s “Season of Love” gets multiplied by fifty – that adds up to half a century.

How have they done it? Inquiring minds want to know. Was Ogden Nash right when he suggested, “To keep brimming the marital cup, when wrong admit it, when right shut up?” Here’s hoping a curious reporter will ask that question, but since the couples haven’t gathered together yet, I have to turn to research in the field of marriage relationships to ask the experts. Dr. John Gottman is one of those experts, and he’s done much of his work side by side with his wife, Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman, which suggests a commitment to the subject of marriage deeper than scientific curiosity. He has researched thousands of marriages for over forty years, and explains his work like this: “I've tried to create a psychology of marriage from the way real, everyday people go about the business of being married, instead of taking it from psychotherapy.”

He claims that after listening to a couple for as little as three hours in guided interactions in his Love Lab (yes, that’s really what he calls it), he can predict which couples will stay together happily – with a 91% accuracy rate. He suggests that successful couples have seven key factors in place in their marriages. They know each other’s goals, worries, and hopes (what he calls their love map). They nurture fondness and admiration, and they turn toward each other rather than toward others. Successful couples allow their partner to influence them, and they solve their solvable problems, using good manners (what a novel idea). They overcome gridlock by honoring each other’s dreams, and they have “an intentional sense of shared purpose, meaning, family values, and cultural legacy that forms a shared inner life.”

Gottman’s last point especially interests me. What are the customs, rituals, and myths (stories) that have sustained these golden couples in our community? I’d love to listen in around the table at the luncheon, or to sit in living rooms across our county and say, “tell me a story of your marriage.”

I’m guessing that if I had a chance to have those conversations, sooner or later I might hear something like how Ray Barone describes it in “Everybody Loves Raymond”: “No! I got this! Look, you want to know what marriage is really like? Fine. You wake up- she's there. You come back from work- she's there. You fall asleep- she's there. You eat dinner- she's there. You know? I mean, I know that sounds like a bad thing. But, it's not.”

While Raymond may not have the clinical expertise or research experience that John Gottman does, he gets it. The Book of Common Prayer first recorded the words in 1549: "To have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part." Vows, spoken to each other more than half a century ago, have sustained many a couple through deep waters and dark days. As those words are lived out through faithful presence, marriages can thrive for twenty-six million minutes and longer. Congratulations, Golden Couples of Ashland County!