USA: “I’m so glad that I’m not young any more...."

Books & Arts Marriage It gets better, or so they say The Economist, London August 28, 2008 “I’m so glad that I’m not young any more,” sang 70-year-old Maurice Chevalier in the film “Gigi”. Quite right, says Maggie Scarf, an American journalist who has written a succession of books on family and marriage. In this one, she turns her attention to couples in their 50s and 60s, and finds older marriage is full of unexpected pleasures. Is it just a sense of the shortening future that makes married couples grow more comfortable together with age? Perhaps. But, as she points out, the future for older people is not nowadays so short: in 1900 life expectancy at the age of 65 in the United States was 11.5 years for men and 12.2 for women; by 2003 that had risen to 16.8 and 19.8 respectively, and is still growing. This is a journalistic book — a collage of interviews with half a dozen couples and descriptions of research reports — and the material is sometimes stretched. But the clearest message, both from the research and from the couples, is upbeat. Those later years are, of course, a time of adjustments. The nest empties. Retirement approaches. The body may start to hint that it is not immortal. Lust languishes, in spite of Viagra. As in late adolescence, argues Ms Scarf, people once again have to forge an individual identity. Without a growing family or a career to provide self-definition, older people must answer anew the teenage question, “Who am I?” This time around, however, the answers are more manageable. The popular image of these late years may be of crusty and decrepit ancients. The reality is that, as people age, their conflicts grow less acute and their ability to draw pleasure from the more agreeable aspects of life increases. In the words of one group of researchers whose work Ms Scarf examined: “Older couples, compared to middle-aged couples, expressed lower levels of anger, disgust, belligerence and whining and higher levels of one important emotion, namely affection.” The parts of the brain associated with anger and aggression gradually shrink as people cross the threshold to old age. Emotional stability steadily improves. Should unhappily married people split up? Ms Scarf addresses this question in a chapter called “Does Divorce Make People Happy?” The short answer seems to be, rarely. She quotes a study of people in unhappy marriages which followed up the couples five years later. Its conclusion: unhappily married adults who divorced or separated were no happier, on average, than unhappily married adults who stayed married to the same partner. Only one in five of them was happily remarried. More surprisingly, a majority of those who remained married pronounced themselves happy at the end of the five-year period. Among Ms Scarf’s interviewees are several couples who went through a rocky patch but stayed together. What word, she asked one couple, would describe the later years of their lives together. “The new beginning”, said one partner. “Peace”, said the other. So be it, if you can make it to that point. Perhaps Chevalier was right. Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2008.