The Secret to 60 Years

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For our 60th wedding anniversary John and I planned a little party. My thoughts went back to another party we threw nearly 50 years earlier. That was a 60th anniversary celebration too—my grandparents’. For a week before that event I vacuumed, washed windows, borrowed dishes. I even splurged on a cleaning lady to help me wash and wax the floors. Mrs. Hargrove was a large, silent, efficient person who went stolidly about her work without much interest in the reason for all these party preparations. “Just think, Mrs. Hargrove,” I said, trying to draw her into my excitement, “60 years together!” Nothing but the sound of the mop slapping the floor. At last, Mrs. Hargrove picked up the bucket and made her only comment on the subject, “An awful long time with just one man.”

Now, half a century later, preparing for our own sixtieth milestone, I remembered that remark. And knew why Mrs. Hargrove was wrong. The reason can be summed up in a single word. A word that, when I was growing up, was part of every marriage service. A word I used to hate.

Like most little girls, I loved weddings. The flowers, the bridesmaids’ dresses, the bride in her white veil…it was romantic and wonderful! Until the beautiful bride had to promise to “love, honor and obey” her husband. It’s not fair! I’d want to cry from the pew where I sat in my white gloves. I would never, ever, I decided as the newlywed couple came down the aisle together, make such a promise to someone.

But, in fact, my own marriage vows, when I came to make them in 1947, were even more lopsidedly tilted toward husband-as-boss. There were no bridesmaids that December morning, no veil, just a civil service in Geneva, Switzerland, where both John and I were students at the university. Sitting in stiff chairs, John and I listened to a gray-bearded official behind a desk read aloud the standard Swiss marriage contract that spelled out the meaning of obey in alarming detail. The husband was to make all decisions, control all finances, have sole say over the upbringing of children. But this is Switzerland, I told myself, where in 1947 women were still not allowed to vote. Mandated male domination represented Europe’s past, not America’s future. Indeed, by the time we returned to the States in 1950, obey had begun to disappear from the marriage rite, and by the '60s was rarely heard.

So I stopped tensing at weddings for the objectionable word. Then in 1965 I went on a weekend silent retreat at a monastery overlooking the Hudson River. We were to silence our voices, the monk leading the retreat told us, in order to hear God’s. “The Latin word for hearing,” he said, “is audire. It’s the root of our English word obedience. To obey God means to hear him.” Obey…this word I’d resisted so long? And rightly, I’m sure, if obey means the imposition of one person’s will on another. But suppose there was an older, deeper, truer meaning. Suppose “love, honor and hear” were, in fact, the best promises any bride could make to her husband.

That weekend I began to grasp how hard it is to hear—really hear! Whether it’s God’s voice we’re listening for or another human being’s, how our own fears, assumptions and expectations get in the way! For a husband and wife especially, they can drown out the voice of the actual person in front of us. That’s where Mrs. Hargrove was wrong of course: It’s never 60 years—or 20 or five—with one man, because husbands and wives change over the years. The person across the breakfast table today is not the individual we married yesterday—and this can be threatening to the voice inside us, forever chattering on about our own needs.

At my grandparents’ anniversary party, John and I were very different people from the students who had married in Switzerland 11 years earlier. Instead of a sixth-floor walk-up in Paris, we lived in a house in suburban New York. Instead of bicycles, we had a station wagon, instead of lectures at the Université, we attended parent-teacher conferences.

In adjusting to all this, each of us had changed. Parenthood especially revealed new sides of who we were. I plunged into the darkness of clinical depression and came out perhaps wiser, certainly humbler. John had to care single-handedly for the children and for me with strength in himself he hadn’t suspected. And through the years, we kept changing, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. The biggest change of all, the hardest one for me to adapt to, was when, 12 years after we married, John made his “leap of faith.” Even talking about such things embarrassed me; religion had played no part in our lives. For years I struggled to understand, to hear—to obey, I would say today—this new person. And John, seeing me hard of hearing, waited without pressuring until my “crawl of faith” brought me too into this new dimension.
Another change was his decision to get into publishing. Suddenly our house was filled with employees, prospective writers, an accountant, partners he brought into the company. Night and day they traipsed through our home, destroying the concentration I needed for my own work. I’d married a writer, not a businessman with all this flurry and traffic.

Over the years, to handle these and oth-er changes, we developed a set of hearing aids. Learning to hear has been a much more conscious effort since that retreat on the banks of the Hudson, but our first lesson came right after we married. We’d rented a room in the home of a once-wealthy Geneva family, reduced to taking in boarders. What ancient grievance lay between husband and wife we never knew, just that we never once heard them speak to each other. Dinnertimes were the worst. It was a sit-down meal served by the maid who was all that remained of the household staff. Husband and wife sat in grim-faced silence at opposite ends of the long table, the frigid atmosphere so contagious that even asking for the butter seemed a frivolous outburst. John and I decided right then we’d never let a hurt fester between us. It was hard for John, raised in a family where voices were never raised, to learn that anger did not mean loss of love. Hard for me to discover how petty were the things that upset me. But as we learned to voice our grievances, we discovered the first truth about hearing: It does no good to listen if no one’s speaking.

Another hearing aid we discovered is to walk while we talk. Like all long-married couples we have our own vocabulary we call “hog hilling.” Hog Hill Road is a quiet street near us where we’ve probably logged 500 miles over the years, speaking and listening. Going outdoors takes the issue out into a larger world where our problems don’t loom so large. It puts us side by side instead of face to face in confrontation. We’ve hog hilled all over the world, finding ears hear best when feet are moving. There are other aids: not to take up hard subjects when we’re tired, never at bedtime, not when we’re rushing to do something else. And perhaps the best hearing device of all, to talk not about facts but feelings. Not about what one of us did or failed to do, but about the emotions involved. Feelings are something we all have in common, truths we can hear. As John’s publishing venture took over more of the house, we escaped to Hog Hill Road where he told me how exhilarating it felt to be launching this new enterprise, using talents untapped since he’d designed and sold stickers in school. I told him how it made me feel when strangers walked into the room where I was writing in my favorite bathrobe. We heard—obeyed—each other.

As I’ve learned to obey John in this profoundest sense, I now believe “love, honor and obey” are three words for the same thing. I can’t love someone who doesn’t exist. I can’t honor a person as he used to be —that static “one man” of Mrs. Hargrove’s jaundiced view—and ignore the person he has become. It’s only when I hear my husband right now that I can offer him love and honor. Hearing is hard, but I’m getting better at it as our marriage enters its seventh decade, learning to keep my ears attuned to the partner-that-is. Not the husband-who-was—yesterday, last year or 60 years ago—but the fascinating, new man I meet across the table each morning.

This article originally appeared in Guideposts magazine. Visit the recently updated guideposts.com today.