My mom died a few days short of their 63rd. IIRC, their #1 was “Don’t go to bed angry – at anyone.”
Like the OP, they loved to travel. They never did drive the length of the ALCAN Highway like they wanted.
I’m sure some will wonder what their secret was!
Daniel Frederick Bakeman (October 9, 1759 – April 5, 1869) was ostensibly the last surviving veteran of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). He was born in Schoharie County, New York and at the age of twelve married Susan Brewer (who was fourteen and a half) on August 29, 1772. Their marriage, at 91 years and 12 days, is the longest claimed on record and also the only marriage claimed to have exceeded 90 years. Together they had eight children: Phillip, Richard, Christopher, Betsey, Margaret, Susan, Mary and Christine. Susan died on September 10, 1863 at the age of one hundred and five years. Records have shown that in 1825 the Bakemans settled in Arcade, New York, in a home on the north side of the County Line Road. In 1845 he moved to Freedom, remaining there until his death.
Our 27th is this week. We’ve known each other since high school around 1984. At this point we’re too lazy and unmotivated (and comfortable) to upset the apple cart. Altho there have been some times…
Met in 1973, age 15. Dated throughout high school, stayed in touch during (separate) college experiences, moved in together Jan 1, 1980, married 18 months later, will soon celebrate 40 years married.
We travel well together, still lust for each other, no longer try to fix each other, have our separate and joint interests that keep us busy together and on our own.
Married in April of '83. I guess it will be 38 years this weekend. Thanks for the reminder.
We’ve been married 17 years this April and I think it boils down to not being buttholes to each other. But when we are buttholes to each other, working through it. And when working through it isn’t helping as much as we’d like, getting help. So, I guess stubbornness has a lot to do with it. And seconded (or thirded) on the humor. I’ve never met anyone who can make me laugh like my husband can. And hopefully he feels the same way - he seems to anyway.
We met at the end of October - he was the instructor in a sailing class I was taking. First date, Nov 12, eloped Dec 9. It’s been 37+ years. It’s just worked. We have some interests in common as well as some that we don’t share. I like pottery, he likes motorcycles - we tolerate each other’s interests. 
We’re both engineers, so we have that in common, and we both like learning new stuff.
I don’t think I can point to any particular formula - we just get along. Lots has changed over the years - like we no longer sail - but we mostly go with the flow and do what we can. Maybe not all hearts-and-flowers romantic, but it works.
My Beloved and I have been married for 32 years. We have a lot of shared interests…but we also have interests that we will never share. These unshared interests are not merely tolerated, but fully accepted, because a good marriage consists of a merging of two (or perhaps more) different and distinct people.
So far, the secret seems to be meeting your spouse on SDMB. Check with me again in another 40 years or so, to be sure.
This May will be our 26th wedding anniversary; we’ve been together 28 years.
Having complementary personalities has been, I think, a big part of our success. She’s much like the stereotypical “Type A” personality; ambitious, hard-charging, assertive, always engaged with something. I’m much more laid-back, patient, and slow to anger. Importantly, we both understand these differences and respect them in the other. She’s the very successful professional, and I’m the stay-at-home spouse; she couldn’t have been the very successful professional if I had not been the stay-at-home. She knows that and respects all of the day-to-day stuff I take off her plate; I know that and am happy to let her shine and achieve all that she wanted to achieve.
We have enough interests in common that we enjoy spending time together (reading, wine, travel, SCUBA diving), but enough individual interests that we don’t need to be together 100% of the time.
She is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, and I flatter myself to think I’m of above-average intelligence, but even there we have complementary intelligences. She’s one of those people that seems capable of learning virtually anything she sets her mind to; I’m more the trivial fact accumulator. I think I have a higher EQ than she does; she understands office politics and how to get things done through an organization better than I do.
This will probably sound weird, but I think the fact that she spent a lot of her career on the road was a good thing; we each had our space during the week to do our own thing, work to our own schedules, etc., and then we had weekends to catch up, enjoy being together, and reset and recharge for the next week. We love being together, but are both independent enough that it is zero stress on our relationship to be apart for a bit sometimes.
I really do think the best marriages look like the yin/yang symbol; two individuals who can mesh together to create a cohesive whole. I think the keys are that both partners have to recognize the complementary traits, respect them, and celebrate them.
One piece of advice I do remember getting during some pre-marital counseling we did was to think of the marriage as a third entity that needs just as much care and feeding as you and your partner. There’s you, your partner, and the marriage, and each deserves and requires as much attention as the others. I think it’s a good image to keep in mind, especially when there’s conflict.
Don’t sweat the petty stuff, and vice-versa. (and that, my friend, is petty stuff)
Been married 31 years next month. A long, long time ago, I noticed that when I was at work, talking with friends at lunch, most of the time I mentioned my wife was something negative - oh, she did this that annoyed me, or yelled about that or whatever. When I stopped talking about the stupid little negative things, MY attitude changed - got much more positive.
I think the biggest thing that people forget is that they are not the most important person in the world - other people’s opinions and needs and whatevers are just as important as theirs. Don’t obsess over the negatives or the “what-ifs” or the “what’s missings”; enjoy what’s there.
My wife and I met at summer camp 29 years ago, she was in high school and I was in university. We’ll have been married 22 years in June.
We’ve dealt with major health issues - real ones on my side, luckily false alarms on hers but that would have been life altering. The first of mine was less than 2 years after we were married and made us focus on ourselves for my recovery.
If I had to say one thing that cemented our success was that we NEVER run the other one down to outside parties. Bitch to your partner about any issues, don’t air dirty laundry.
“Never go to bed angry” is absolute crap. Putting an artificial time limit on human emotion leads to an artificial resolution to an actual problem.
Or some things work for some people and not for others.
IMO, asking people in long term marriages what factors resulted in their success is a lot like asking 100 year old people what resulted in their long life. Which is commonly done, but I think these insights are not worth anything. Questions about long term marriage are not quite as bad as that, because people are more capable of seeing what works and doesn’t work in their relationship, or assessing what made them stay on, than figuring out what made them as healthy and long lived as they are. But that said, I think human nature is complex, and relationships are complex, and many times people themselves don’t really know why their relationships lasted or didn’t.
Which is not to say it’s not still an interesting discussion. Just that I think some caution is warranted in putting stock in the answers.
I myself have been married for ~30 years, but I don’t know if I have any unique insights to share about it. But what I will say is this: there’s nothing which can replace a long term relationship. Nothing.
If you’re married to someone for several decades, even if you replaced that spouse with someone who would objectively make a much better spouse, you can’t replace what you lost. You have a relationship which lasted that long, that person is part of your entire life in a way that someone that you recently met can never be. This is a person who you went through life together with, starting out in one place and situation, now in a different place and situation and were together for the whole ride. Struggling to achieve things, to overcome adversity together, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, through the ups and downs, the good times, the bad times, now sharing what you’ve built together, family-wise, socially, financially etc. Can’t be replaced.
Point being that once your relationship lasts long enough, it begins to have a force of its own, which keeps things together even where a shorter-term relationship with the same qualities might have faded. Of course, it’s not absolute, and there are long-term relationships which break up. But it’s a powerful force.
My husband and I had this conversation recently because I cannot stand leaving things unresolved. I have non - stop anxiety when there is an unresolved conflict and can think of nothing else. It doesn’t bother my husband, but given how much it triggers my childhood emotional abuse, he defers to me.
So sorry, I can’t go to bed angry. But we don’t have any issues with each other that can’t be resolved in a 20 minute conversation. Usually.
Seriously, with the Facebook data mining thing, how hard is it to resolve, really? “I’m sorry you feel like I don’t care what you have to say. I hate feeling like I’m being patronized but I recognize that’s an issue I need to work on more. I’ll make an effort not to shut you out in the future.”
Boom. Done.
The only real challenge there is we need to get over our anger first, but we can diffuse that pretty readily by holding hands or something. Or just, “I’m sorry.” I’m sorry diffuses anger pretty quickly.
So from the start of an argument to its resolution, maybe an hour tops.
Usually.
Married 51 years in another 8 weeks, together exclusively 52 years this August.
In hindsight these were our “secrets”:
- Friends first, married later. We are still each others’ best friend.
- Lower your expectations as necessary.
- Childless by choice. Neither of us had ever felt parental longings, that didn’t change when we met each other and hasn’t since then.
- Stubborness helped us get through rough spots that could have been fatal to the relationship.
31 years for us. I don’t have many ideas to offer, because I think it comes down to, ‘Don’t marry a jerk’, and ‘Don’t be a jerk’. Try to understand the other person’s point of view, don’t be selfish,
If you marry someone with different values and goals for life, you’re in for a hard time unless you can figure out a way to compartmentalize that stuff. But if, for example, you value power and success and money and your spouse wants a simple life and values having you at home and focusing more inwards, you’re going to have problems.
In engineering speak, most projects that die, like most marriages that die, start with poor requirements gathering at the beginning. Probably the best key to marriage success is to not marry the wrong person in the first place.
Met my now wife in 2000. I was barely 19, she was 21. We dated for a few months then got “serious” by moving in together. We were married in 2003.
I think that a lot of our success is that we met young. I know that flies in the face of conventional wisdom but to a very large extent we became adults together. We learned how to live on our own together, we lost our virginity to each other, we learned what works in our relationship and what doesn’t together. That allowed us to learn how to work together and overcome differences with few arguments and little drama. We matured together so we “click” together in a pretty fundamental way.
But at the heart of it is, I think, the simple fact that we like each other a lot. More than just love – we certainly are still madly in love. We don’t share the same music tastes or TV likes or anything that. We have different senses of humor. But we still would rather be with each other than anyone else, we value each other’s opinion, and try to listen and understand where the other person is coming from. I think this stems, again, from maturing together rather than bringing ingrained habits and expectations to the relationship. This may sound like a codependent relationship but it isn’t, we lived apart for 19 months while we were finishing college (different schools) this was 11 years after we had gotten married and had kids. We’re still going strong and very happy.
43 years. Co-dependence.