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In the past, “marrying well” mostly meant finding a good spouse and having a successful marriage.
But in an age when people may live to 100, what happens after the wedding has become just as important.
The question is no longer simply whom you marry, but how you live with that person for decades.
As life expectancy increases, married life grows longer as well.
If someone marries at 30 and lives to 80, that is 50 years of marriage. Staying at the same company for 50 years would be considered extraordinary. Yet in marriage, we expect two people to live together for that long.
When you think about it, marriage is an extraordinary commitment.
There is an 80-year-old man I still remember.
He married for the first time in his twenties. After living with his first wife for about 30 years, they divorced.
He later remarried and spent nearly another 30 years with his second wife.
One day, he smiled and said,
“When I think about it, I’ve lived through 30 years of marriage twice. I suppose I really have lived a long life.”
Then he added something that stayed with me.
“If I hadn’t remarried, I would have spent those 30 years alone. Just thinking about that frightens me.”
His words made me think again about what marriage means in an age of longevity.
In the past, life itself was shorter. People married, raised their children, and by the time their children were grown, they were often already entering old age.
Today, things are different.
Someone who separates from a spouse in their sixties may still have another 20 or 30 years ahead of them.
That is why remarriage in one’s sixties, or finding a new partner later in life, is no longer so unusual.
And the person who was right for you at 30 may not necessarily be the same kind of person you need at 60.
As marriage grows longer, the people within it inevitably change.
A husband at 30 and the same husband at 60 are technically the same person, but in many ways, they are not.
The same is true of a wife.
Careers change. Financial circumstances change. Health changes. Interests change. Personalities evolve. Priorities shift.
And when the children grow up and leave home, the relationship between husband and wife changes once again.
During my 35 years of matchmaking and marriage counseling, I have seen this many times.
Couples who seemed to live together without serious problems while raising their children suddenly become uncomfortable with each other once the children leave home.
“I didn’t notice it when we were so busy raising the kids.”
“Now that it’s just the two of us, we have nothing to talk about.”
I have heard comments like these more than once.
For years, their shared role as parents had connected them.
Once that role became smaller, they had to face each other again—not simply as a mother and father, but as a man and a woman.
And sometimes they discovered that they no longer knew how.
A longer marriage means something else as well.
You cannot expect to marry once and remain in exactly the same relationship for the rest of your life.
Even with the same spouse, you may have to build a new relationship with each other several times.
The relationship you have as newlyweds is different from the one you have while raising young children.
That relationship changes again when the children become teenagers.
It changes when they leave home.
It changes when you retire.
And it changes again as you grow old together.
In a 50-year marriage, you may remain married to the same person while meeting several different versions of that person along the way.
Your spouse must do the same with you.
When people are young and in love, they often want to do everything together.
They want to know where the other person is going, what they are doing, and whom they are meeting. They want to spend as much time together as possible.
But when two people are going to share 30, 40, or 50 years, the relationship needs room to breathe.
Each person needs friends of their own.
Each needs interests and hobbies of their own.
And each needs time alone.
To me, one of the foundations of a lasting marriage is this:
You enjoy being together, but you are not anxious when you are apart.
There should be an atmosphere in which you can enjoy ordinary daily life together.
And there should be a kind of closeness in which even silence feels comfortable.
The passion of young love alone cannot sustain 50 years of marriage.
Love eventually has to become part of everyday life.
And within that everyday life, two people have to keep finding love again.
There is another lesson I have learned from watching couples over the years.
Do not see your spouse only as family.
When a husband becomes nothing more than “the children’s father,” and a wife becomes nothing more than “the children’s mother,” something important can gradually disappear.
The man and the woman behind those roles can disappear.
After 35 years of meeting and counseling people about marriage, I have come to realize that the desire to be appreciated by the opposite sex does not simply disappear with age.
People still want to feel attractive.
They still want affection.
They still want companionship.
They still want to know that someone is happy to see them.
That can remain true in their sixties, seventies, and even eighties.
The 80-year-old man told me that the thought of spending 30 years alone frightened him.
Perhaps what he was talking about was not simply marriage.
He was talking about companionship.
Even in old age, we want someone to eat with.
Someone to talk to.
Someone who waits for us.
And someone we might miss when they are not there.
So how should we think about marriage when a lifetime may stretch to 100 years?
First, instead of searching only for someone who seems perfectly compatible with you today, consider whether this is someone you can continue adjusting to as both of you change.
Second, do not make your spouse your entire world. Two people may be able to stay together longer when each is also able to maintain a world of their own.
Third, do not allow the roles of parent, provider, or family member to completely replace the relationship between husband and wife. Even as you grow older, continue to see and appreciate the person you married.
In the past, people often focused on one question:
“Whom should I marry?”
In an age of 100-year lives, there is another question that may be just as important:
“How will we continue choosing each other for the next 50 years?”
Living longer has not simply made marriage longer.
It has made marriage a relationship that must keep changing, adapting, and renewing itself.
Perhaps marrying well is not simply finding the right person once.
It is learning how to keep building the right relationship—with the same person—as both of you change throughout life.
