Marriage in your 70s

We were in Subic a few days ago. I wanted to pass by a mall to pick up wooden trays I had seen on our way in. We got there a bit early so I was just walking slowly followed by Loy, my husband, who was reading something he had received on his cell phone. I looked up and saw a lady who was sitting at a table having coffee with her husband staring at me.

“Tweetums?” she said. I smiled. “I know your story. I read you all the time. My friends and I talk about you.”

“My husband,” I said, gesturing to Loy, who looked up from his cell and smiled.

“You both look happy,” her husband said. “That’s all that’s important.

“Who would have thought anyone reads me here?” I commented to Loy as we walked.

“You are read all over the country,” he said with a reassuring smile. “They ask for your advice. They wonder what it’s like to be married at our age. Why does this surprise you?”

 I don’t really know, but it does. I write my columns at home then email them without considering that I write for a national newspaper with quite a circulation. I consciously decided that my column would be about my life — the parts that have similar experiences with everyone else’s life — so I guess people relate to what I write.

“Write about marriage at our age,” Loy said. I remember meeting a lady recently who looked at us dreamily and said, “I want to get married at 70!” She made me smile.

It’s not just this late age. Loy was widowed almost seven years ago so he has been alone for a long time. When I computed how long it had been since I was married I came up with 41 years of not living fulltime with a man. We both had stretches of aloneness and loneliness until, like a flash of lightning, we discovered each other. We were friends for more than a year before that happened and when it happened, it was instant, and we have not been separated since.

 At our age there are no more children to take care of. His youngest child is 32, my youngest is 47. They don’t need their parents anymore. We are truly free. Once his children were unusually devoted to him and were always inviting him to go out with them. He always went. Now they have seen that he prefers to be with me, a woman closer his age, closer to his brilliance. 

 My children have all been always independent. I brought them up that way. So, yes, they were at our wedding but that’s about it. Two of my daughters were dismayed that I lacked teeth (my bridge broke years ago; I went to have it reinstalled two weeks too late and it didn’t fit anymore; I couldn’t afford a new set) so they have sent me the name of their chosen dentist and promised to pay for my new bridge. How independent is that?

 We spend our time together and the difference that I see between my earlier marriage and this one is that this one is the start of a new life between two people who have had different but rich experiences in their lives. I can see that if I had stayed with my husband and aged with him, I would now look every second as old as I am, or even older, and probably both of us would be bored to death because, though not our faults, we would have nothing much to talk about. We would have lived together for 55 years, experienced the same things; what would be left to discover about each other? What would we find still exciting about each other? We already know everything about each other inside out. We probably would be too comfortable with each other.

 Sometimes I cannot help but think that sameness, which results in boredom, is the enemy of marriage. Boredom is an issue that’s difficult to face and difficult also to address if you do not share the same silliness, the same drive to do something new, the same desire to adventure, explore, laugh and have a good time. In fact, as I write this, this paragraph would be my advice to people who have been married many years. If you are bored, face it, talk and laugh about it, and dare to try something new, something that will bring out new traits in you, things that will make you find excitement in each other again. 

The surprise in our 70s marriage is the novelty of it. It is not like anything that has happened before. We are not the same people we were before. We find ourselves new and revitalized, still hungry for each other, sharing our laughter, discovering new pleasure together, discovering sides of ourselves we didn’t know before and delighting tremendously in these discoveries. 

Try it. You will live it!

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