Long-Term Marriage - Better with Age - 9/8/08

[Smartmarriages]

Note: This SF Chronicle article references two different "studies" - a
long-term study by Richard Levenson at Stanford which confirms the U-Curve
marriage-satisfaction trajectory and another in which Maggie Scarf
interviewed 70 east cost, long-married couples which forms the basis of her
just-released book September Songs. - diane


Book shows some marriages get better with age
San Francisco Chronicle
Fiona Ng, Special to The Chronicle
September 7, 2008

> Thus began the Fergusons' participation in the longest longitudinal study ever
> - conducted over two decades, and concluding this year - on long-term
> marriage.
> 
> "We were thinking it would be interesting to look at a group of couples who
> have been together long enough to have gotten through those rough, early
> problems that plague marriages," said Richard Levenson, who devised the study
> alongside the Relationship Research Institute's John Gottman and Laura
> Carstensen at Stanford. . . .

> "You may lose hearing, you may lose memory, you may lose reaction time, you
> may have losses of all kinds that have to do with aging - the fact is that
> there's one domain where ... you often gain, which is emotional control and
> emotional processing," she says.
> 
> This increased aptitude, Levenson's research also found, is one ingredient in
> marital longevity.



At 59 and 64 years old, Barbara and Gene Ferguson consider themselves
exceptional in several respects.

For one, they married late, comparatively speaking, for their generation.
And they are still married, after more than 30 years - very happily so.

The Fergusons meant the till-death-do-us-part pledge made on that spring day
in February 1975. When they were in their ninth year of marriage, Barbara
spotted an ad in a local newspaper recruiting couples in the Berkeley area
for a long-term marriage study. Given that the only thing she ever seemed to
hear about marriage had to do with folks wanting to get out of it, the ad
got her attention. "My parents were divorced," she says. "It interested me."

Barbara showed it to her husband. "I really had no idea what it was going to
be," Gene recalled. "I was like, 'Sure, I am game.' "

Thus began the Fergusons' participation in the longest longitudinal study
ever - conducted over two decades, and concluding this year - on long-term
marriage.

"We were thinking it would be interesting to look at a group of couples who
have been together long enough to have gotten through those rough, early
problems that plague marriages," said Richard Levenson, who devised the
study alongside the Relationship Research Institute's John Gottman and Laura
Carstensen at Stanford.

Long-term marriage is only recently getting the kind of research attention
that has long been focused on the early years. Last week, "September Songs:
The Good News About Marriage in the Later Years," (Riverhead Books, 243
pgs.; $24.95) by Maggie Scarf was published, a book that reveals her
findings after interviewing nearly 70 older couples in the East Coast about
their lives.

"In the 1900s, the average life expectancy was 47.6," Scarf says. "And in
this century, the fact is that there's this huge increase in the lifespan. I
wanted to study this group from this point of view."

What she and Levenson discovered is that long marriages do not necessarily
deserve the bad rap they have gotten as inevitably boring and passionless.

"Common thinking was that, as marriages age, they sort of burn out, and they
become kind of distant and disconnected," says Levenson. "We learned right
away that was not the case, that marriages continue to be really just as
emotional, in terms of the overall amount of emotions, in middle and late
life as they do early in life."

Marriages follow U-curve

The study also suggests that the trajectory of some long-term marriages
follows something of a U-curve, in that some older couples feel a jump in
marital satisfaction in the latter stages of union - a rediscovery of the
kind of contentment that typically characterizes the early stages of
coupledom.

"Couples are pretty happy with their marriages when they are newlyweds, then
their satisfaction sinks during the difficult times, such as the birth of
children, children going off school and balancing family building with
career building. Thus, during the middle years of marriages, couples are
less happy with their marriages," Levenson said. "But then, after the
children leave home and sometimes also after retirement, many couples who
stay together rediscover each other and become happier."

Even so, he added, it is not a pure, bump-free return, as issues of health,
money and adjusting to life after retirement remain sources of possible
tension.

To reach his findings, Levenson and his team recruited two groups of
heterosexual couples, all in their first marriages, in the Bay Area in the
mid-1980s. Group 1 included those in their 40s and 50s who had been married
for at least 15 years; the second sample was people in their 60s and 70s,
married an average of 35 years. The idea was to see what would happen as
Group 1 became the age of Group 2 and Group 2 dealt with health changes and
widowhood. Every five years or so, Levenson and his team checked in on the
groups.

These sessions were essentially conversations, which were videotaped,
between husbands and wives - the kind of chats couples would have at the
dinner table and after being apart. The Fergusons remember the sensors taped
above their pulses and sweat glands clearly - one tool Levenson and his team
used to measure certain physiological responses denoting, among other
attributes, how well one spouse can calm and comfort the other. "Couples
that can't soothe each other don't do well over the long run, and during
late life in particular, this is the person you turn to for things," he
said.

Communication is key

There were also questions about arguments - how much, why they have them,
etc. - which stumped Elaine and Gust Platias, Bay Area natives who have been
married for 53 years. She is 74, he's 79. Over five decades, the Platiases
have gone through ups and downs, including their youngest daughter being
diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the 1980s, and the Oakland firestorm of
1991, which burned down their home. Instead of caving under the pressure,
though, the two got closer. How? By talking things through, listening to the
other person, compromising.

"We don't have that many things that are so different. Gust is very
agreeable, and I can always tell when he's not going to be happy about
something, and I don't push it," says Elaine, who joined the study because
she, too, thought there was little information about why couples stay
together.

"That's right. If anything, I always give in," Gust chimes in gleefully.

"That's why I married him," jokes Elaine. The couple burst into laughter.

Regulating emotion

In Levenson's research parlance, that laughter could be tagged as warm, long
and affectionate. After each visit, the research lab spent a couple of years
cataloging every taped conversation for various kinds of laughter, emotions
(anger, happiness, sadness, fear, disgust) and particular words and phrases
(among them: I love you, I hate you, you don't respect me, you don't like
me).

"The thing we were most interested in is how couples express and regulate
emotion," says Levenson. "We are interested in the emotions they show on
their face, the emotional words they say and the ways that emotions are
manifest in their physiology."

In her book, Scarf explains that changes occur in the brain (for example,
the pre-frontal cortex, a recent Australian study has shown) as one ages,
making an older person happier and more able to deal with stress. Another
cause is that older people are more focused.

"People are not looking to make it with somebody who's looking to further
their career, they are not putting on hold anything that has to do with
emotional gratification. They are aware that their time left to live is
shorter than the time that has passed by, in terms of years once you pass
50," Scarf says.

"You may lose hearing, you may lose memory, you may lose reaction time, you
may have losses of all kinds that have to do with aging - the fact is that
there's one domain where ... you often gain, which is emotional control and
emotional processing," she says.

This increased aptitude, Levenson's research also found, is one ingredient
in marital longevity.

For Barbara Ferguson, the description rings true. She singles out her 40s as
being the most trying period: She was operating a day care center for
toddlers out of their Oakland home (which she still does now), so that she
could be there for their two boys, now 28 and 24. Her husband was working as
an assistant registrar, away from the house every weekday between 6:15 a.m.
and 6:15 p.m.

At times, the mundanity was overwhelming. "It probably was a difficult time
for me personally, because you're kind of going ... 'This is it. This is
it,' " says Barbara. "And it took me (getting) through my 40s to go, 'It is
it. It's perfect. I have two great kids, I have a wonderful husband, I have
got my business.' "

Communication, compassion and commitment, Ferguson says, were what pulled
her and her husband through the rough waters of life - and marriage.

"I think we'll have a lot of bliss in the next 10, 20 years," she says. "But
you have got to work at it to make it work. It's not a given."


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