Can Long Term Marriage Be Happy?

August 26, 2011

Interview with Maggie Scarf, author of the book September Songs: The Good News About Marriage in the Later Years

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Mike Carruthers:
Can people truly be content after years or decades of marriage? It's a question we've probably all wondered about at some point. Now someone's actually looked into this. And what did she find with these long-married couples?

Maggie Scarf:
They're happy - they're just happy! The marriages are so much more serene; they're affectionate; they've weathered the storm.
 

Maggie Scarf, author of the book September Songs: The Good News About Marriage in the Later Years, interviewed couples between the ages of fifty and seventy and she says…

People are taking time seriously. They're aware of the ticking clock: that the years they have left to live are less than the years that they have lived. So time is a precious commodity and people want to squeeze the juice out of their lives.

Although they're out there, amazingly Maggie did not come across any couples in that age range of fifty to seventy who were miserable - even if they had been unhappy earlier in their marriage.

And you know when I asked them if this were a movie or a book of this time of your life, what would the title be? And I heard things like: tranquility, peace, set free - it's so antithetical to everything that we think of in our youth-intoxicated society - "oh being young is the best time of life".