19 years, though about 6 of those years were online.
6 years, for the current wife,
about 4 months for the ex wife
First date Oct. 31 1972, I was 17. Married in his parents backyard June 1976. Keeps getting better every year.
At least five years. I flirted with her for awhile, and she decided to up and kiss me around 6 months after that. We dated for 5 years and a day before getting married, and we’re working on year 19.
Do you see the different outcomes of the two experiments as caused by the longer pre-marriage time, or is that an unrelated variable?
Six years, six months, thirteen days from meeting to wedding day. Thirty-three years the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
Oh no, it most definitely had different outcomes. My first wife and I were young and dumb and fully of hormones, what we thought was love was just us being exceptionally horny and prone to sneaking off to bump uglies no matter where or when. No occasion, set of circumstances, location, whatever, was to solemn or sacred for us.
My Now-Mrs. Guest and I took plenty of time, in part because she is a generation younger and in part because I don’t particularly care to go through divorce trauma again.
The two marriages are like day and night in terms of over all happiness and satisfaction, for me any way, Mrs. Guest has never been married before me. I strive to make her happy and satisfied and never feel the need to look elsewhere.
Met in August 1980, married June 1, 1991. I can’t believe we’ve been together for 36 years.
(I’m not that old, dammit!)
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My wife and I were co-workers, but did not date each other at the time. We were both dating other people. A few years later I ran into her, and things took off from there. Sneaking up on 40 years of marriage.
Met, knew it was just right straight away (although I was engaged to someone else who would have been a disaster) and married in just under a year.
Been married 42 years. Yet to have an argument. People check that with our daughter because they don’t believe me. She credits her father with the solution - he just quietly makes a cup of tea with extra sugar when I get frazzled and then knows I’ll have calmed down about the frazzle-generating issue by the time I have had a few sips.
I’m not going to say I don’t believe you- but I do wonder about your definition of “argument”. If you mean you’ve never had a screaming fight that involved throwing dishes in 42 years, I’ll believe that, no problem. I’ll even believe that voices have never been raised and nasty comments haven’t been made in 42 years.
But if you mean that there’s never been an issue in 42 years where the two of you disagreed and and you both felt too strongly about it to say just say “yes,dear” (or where “yes dear” has been said in the past but it hasn’t worked) - not about where to go on vacation or that he spends money on lottery tickets that you would rather save, or that you spend too much time doing things for other people, or about him leaving his dirty socks all over, or you always being late or any of the gazillion other things people might argue about- well, I’m still not going to say I don’t believe you, but I’m kind of wondering how that works.
You are right in the way you define arguments. There have never been raised voices. There have been some very quiet times for an hour or so. There are things we disagree on in world affairs and such like, but when it comes to the important things like you mention, we have a system. So there is definitely tongue biting and yes-dearing. I don’t know that our methods would suit others.
We set up rules before we were married for dispute resolution on the Big Issues and have never diverted from them. Friends told us that this was terribly unromantic. Those friends were divorced a few years later.
Rules:
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Family. We each make the final decision about our own side of the family. The other one can express an opinion in private, but to the world it is always a united front. This has saved massive fights, as both of us have/had difficult family members, as I suspect is the case for nearly every marriage. This has been the main issue for tongue biting.
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Money. My husband is a genius. He set up the finances in advance into four main bank accounts and it has worked a treat.
a. Consolidated revenue (we call it Consol) where the money goes for the weekly budget. Budgets are rigorously followed.
b. Savings. For savings. 
Also rigorously planned - if we have more than the planned savings, we can spend it. If not, we don’t. ‘Spend’ often means allocation into:
c. The clincher. Two Luxury Funds. One each. Any spare money - if Consol gets higher than planned, tax returns, jointly decided allocations if Savings is fine … goes into our Luxury funds. These are ours to do with as we wish with no recriminations from the other. He likes to save for camera stuff, I like to buy clothes and ribbons (I have a ludicrously frivolous collection of ribbons), we both buy books and so on. Always equally allocated. If we have money in Luxury, we can buy on whim. if not, we don’t.
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The house. Never been an issue but if it is, I have the final say inside and he does outside. Housekeeping and cooking and all that, we both do our share. We grumble under our breath if we think otherwise but I don’t grumble under my breath very often. I don’t think he does either. It is far too trivial to argue about.
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No lies. Honesty which hurts is better than a single lie (other than whether my bum looks big and such-like).
As for where to go on vacation, when to go out, who to see - that’s never been an issue. He did feel that I was being too unsociable during my last few years doing a PhD and publishing two books from it. He tolerated that, I am now doing more things with him than I may have done because I appreciate his support in that time so much.
Every three months we take our little notebook and go out for afternoon tea. The notebook has our “mission statements” - dreams, goals for the lifestyle we each want. We update our mission statements if needed. Mostly doesn’t. We have all the financial statements and compare them against the planning. It is fun to look back over what we had and wished for decades ago. We then plan to achieve whatever each of us wants over the next months/years/whatever.
I wonder if it helps that both of us have been seriously ill at some stage in the marriage and the other really came to the party doing everything we could for the other. I think the hard times make you appreciate your partner in a way that the great times don’t.
I know that all sounds terribly businesslike, but it isn’t. It’s just terribly safe and warm.
We met in 7th grade, started dating in 11th, and married 5 years, 9 months and 4 days later, just under a month after graduating college.
Some people said we were too young, but I think we had waited long enough.
Obviously it works. And it’s no coincidence that we use the same word “work” for “functions as designed” and “business”.
I notice, though, that your list of Major Topics does not include children. Do you not have any, and if so, was that a mutual decision? I think that that’s one of the major topics of spousal disagreement. Then again, I also think that that’s something that should be discussed well before any marriage, and one of the few points where a serious disagreement really is grounds not to get married, no matter how compatible the couple are otherwise.
Our first date was Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and we were married in 1982. So, about three years.
Regards,
Shodan
My 28 years of marriage has been not unlike lynne-42’s. Probably more tranquil; we’ve never had the hour of silence nor of clenched teeth she mentioned.
We probably approached it a bit less “businesslike” than she describes. But nonetheless it was and is a relationship between two thinking thoughtful charitable adults. Not two insight-free emotophiles. Or worse yet, one of each.
As you suggest, for sure we did some big things in ways that simplified getting along: Don’t have kids, pets, or family living within a thousand miles. Spend less than you earn & adjust promptly when economic hardship strikes. Get hitched late enough in life (30 & 33) that most of the big growing / maturing was already behind us. And get hitched after a long period as friends and neighbors who weren’t necessarily motivated mostly by their glands.
But we didn’t start out planning to avoid most of those things. They mostly just happened.
Our Prime Directive is probably three-fold:
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There is no such thing as a separate best for me. There is only best for us.
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Don’t put up with. That way lies resentment. Ask the other to change it. If they reasonably can they must. Otherwise you must drop your objection. The alternative is keeping score and divorcing when the score gets lopsided enough. Which it inevitably will.
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Be trustworthy. Be trusting. Be charitable. There’s a world of difference between inadvertently giving offense or causing harm and doing it deliberately. Assume the former until proven otherwise.
Silly me. Yes, one child. (Not able to have more.) The rule on that was that I made the decisions but he was heavily into shared parenting. We were both teachers, so that worked well. And yes, times of stress. Parenting always is. In front of her, there was again the always-a-united-front rule.
Edited only because those are the key points I want to mention. Agree with all you say. Love the way you eliminated issues with pets, children and family. We had all three close at hand. One really dumb relative even gave our 5-year-old daughter a kitten for her birthday when my husband is allergic to cats. That took some strategies, because she was not going to give up that kitten who lived to a ripe old cat-age.
I hadn’t thought about it, but your point 1) above is exactly right, and not the way many people function in marriage.
I also hadn’t thought much about your point 3) either. Some people get into a frazzle when the other forgets a birthday or such-like. We avoid that by mentioning it in advance. Or not taking offence for anything not deliberate. And the deliberate doesn’t happen. You can never take back hurtful words. Apologies never wipe the slate clean. Thinking like ‘Us’ does tend to avoid that a bit.
It’s so good to hear from someone else that believes that a marriage without arguments is possible. I so often hear the term “like everyone does” and shudder. It is commonly used in terms of marriage. “We argue, like every married couple does.” - no we don’t.
We met on New Year’s Eve, 1988, moved in together 6 weeks later, got married in 2003 as soon as it was legal in Canada, and just realized we’re coming up on 28 years… and they said it wouldn’t last!
I selected 3-5 years, because that’s when we got around to making it “official.” 
But as for acting as husband and wife in all respects, less than a year.