Women now have choices. They can be married,
not married, have a job, not have a job, be married
with children, unmarried with children. Men have the
same choice we’ve always had: work, or prison.

TIM ALLEN

Love at first sight is easy to understand.
It’s when two people have been looking at each
other for years that it becomes a miracle.

SAM LEVENSON

I believe it was the great American theologian Mark Twain who said, “No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.” Mr. Twain may have been onto something there, because the truth is, getting through the Middle Ages happily married doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. The Daily Mail reports that “the fastest-growing age group embarking on divorce proceedings is currently the over-fifties.”¹⁰ They call it late-life divorce. One couple said: “People change and we forgot to tell each other.” I suppose most couples would admit that they have grounds for divorce. Here are a few stories of how we continue to find grounds for a great marriage.

When Rachael was a three-and-a-half-foot five-year-old with an attitude, she summoned me to her bedroom one night: “Daddy…Haaaalp!”

I found her sitting on the edge of her bed twirling her little green bear and frowning deeply as though I had put cornflakes in her pillow. (Of course, I had not done this. I would do this about five years later.)

“What is it?” I asked.

Lowering the bear, she lifted her head, put her hands on her hips and glared at me. “Are you and Mama gonna get a divorce?” she demanded.

I gulped twice. “Why, honey?”

“I heard you fighting.”

I gulped a third time. “But I love Mama. I, uh—”

“Patty’s mama said the same thing. Now she’s gettin’ a divorce.” It was like she’d picked up a gavel and was about to sentence me.

“No, Your Honor,” I said. “I married Mom for life. Sometimes we don’t agree, but that can be a good thing, don’t you think?”

She wasn’t buying it. “You be nice to her,” she scolded.

“I promise I will,” I said, leaning over and hugging her tightly. “Did you know that seven years before you came along I stood in a great big church and made a promise?”

“Did you look handsome?”

“I had a mustache.”

“Oh.”

“I promised God and about three hundred people that I would be your mamas sweetheart all my life. And I’d stand up tomorrow and say the same thing.”

“Church is tomorrow,” she said as I tucked her and her bear into bed. “You can do it then.”

I once thought that if we could just get our marriage launched and through the land mines of the toddler years, we could put it in neutral and coast all the way home. Bring on middle age. It would be a walk in the park.

But now Ramona and I find ourselves married a quarter of a century, a little tired, sitting at the dinner table talking about the kids and finishing sentences for each other.

Me: So I was gonna—

She: But we don’t need lettuce—

Me: All right, then I’ll—

She: Good, because I was hoping—

Me: Don’t worry. I wouldn’t—

She: But last time you—

Me: I know. But I promise I won’t forget—

She: Chocolate.

Me: Dark chocolate.

Back in 1999, www.over50s.com launched an online dating service. It now boasts more than 250,000 registered users, many of them guys who woke up one Saturday and stood before the mirror, thinking out loud:

“I have been teaching school to eighth graders for twenty-six years, and if I see even one more eighth grader this weekend, I am going to go stark raving mad and crash my grocery cart into the watermelons. What was I thinking when I was twenty-two? I didn’t even like eighth grade, for Pete’s sake. I don’t even know who Pete is. I wanna be a… um…a mechanic. Yes, I love cars. In fact, I think I’ll go buy a little red convertible right now. I think I’ll put on some extra cologne. Buy an iPod. Maybe a Speedo. Do Speedos come in size fifty-two? I’ll bet they do. The sky’s the limit for me. There’s nothing I can’t do. I am so excited. Ouch! I think I pulled some fat.”

I personally have had trouble completely embracing the midlife crisis, although I will admit that I do drive a really hot-looking silver Pontiac Sunfire. But when I see guys my age with women half their age, I get to wondering, what am I doing watching another Clint Eastwood movie? And when I see them in real life, I wonder what they talk about when they sit around the dinner table and the swagger has become a shuffle.

Him: Hey, do you remember back when…oh, never mind.

Her: Did you hear that Britney and Paris had their hair done the same way the same week?

Him: No, but I was reading—

Her: Like in a book?

Him: Yeah. A book about Vladimir Lenin—

Her: I never really liked the Beatles. But I was like thinking that, like, I might wanna go and like get my nails done and, like, finish looking at the pictures in Us magazine.

Him: I was thinking I might want to call my kids.

Her: But they won’t, like, talk to you anymore. Remember?

Him: I was thinking that I’m gonna be sick.

Sadly, I meet so many who have discarded a marriage thinking something lustrous was waiting, only to find out it wasn’t what they thought—like a greyhound that finally catches a mechanical rabbit.

In church recently we were singing “It’s All About You.” I heard a shrill little girl’s voice behind me. She had changed the words ever so slightly to reflect what many of us sing with our lives: “It’s All About Me”

A hospital chaplain told me of the lonely, alienated people he tries to comfort. Folks who at some point started singing the song that way. One recently abandoned his forty-four-year marriage, which seems to me a little like shipwreck survivors diving off the lifeboat within sight of land. Five years later, he was alone when a doctor delivered the news that he had Alzheimer’s, and though I don’t know what kind of cargo he lugged around with him those forty-four years, I can’t help wondering who would have been there to nurse him and love him had he stuck around when everything within yelled “Run!”

There is something that may sound dull and old-fashioned, but I think we lose before we’ve started if we don’t introduce it to our children. It is the beautiful concept of faithfulness. I have seen it in the faces of the aged, in a glance or a wink. It can start today, because God’s mercies are new every morning. It can start when we sit across from our spouse and choose thanksgiving over griping and forgiveness over holding a grudge.

For my wife, it happens when I admit to her that I’d like to pick out some clothes that make me look “younger,” and she doesn’t roll her eyes at all, just helps me pick them out. A few weeks ago I told her I’d love to have one of those little red convertibles, and instead of waking up in the middle of the night to put Super Glue on my eyelids, she bought me a little model Corvette at Costco for $12.99.