Apr. 5, 2015 "Adulthood, part 2": I cut out this article by Mireille Silcoff in the National Post on Feb. 5, 2011.
This article is about how long human life spans have increased, and how we live differently from the people in the 20th century. This mentions how age affects marriage:
Here's the whole article:
This week was my 38th birthday. I was once definitely an Aquarius, but now, after the recent online commotion about shifts in the houses of astrology, and the “new” star sign Ophiucus, I wonder whether I am truly a Capricorn. I do not feel like a Capricorn. But then, I do not feel 38, either.
In truth, I don’t know if I feel younger or older than 38. Sometimes, I know I feel 20, and sometimes I know I feel 80, but I don’t feel like I am in ownership of any useful rudder for getting me to what I am supposed to feel like at all the other times. Age-identity: I imagine once people had a better handle on this sort of thing.
I don’t think it’s merely a personal peculiarity that I don’t. These days, many of us are totally baffled by how exactly to live our age. Whether you are a preteen or past your 100th birthday, it seems it’s equally confusing. Because nobody has ever before been 12, or 30, or 65, or anything else within such a great span of years on Earth. Our personal allotment of time is more gigantic than it ever has been.
Think about this: At the beginning of the 20th century in Canada, the average male lifespan was 47 years. The average female lifespan was 50 years. Today, you can add three decades to each of those statistics. Men 76; women 81.
Let’s just sit with those mind-blowing numbers for a moment. In 100 years, we earned three more decades. When my grandfather, who is almost 103, was born, the life expectancy of the average male was 47. That’s nine years older than I am now; that’s less than half of my grandfather’s actual age.
I recently downloaded a podcast of a brilliant talk given by the writer and cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, part of a retreat entitled “Wisdom and Time,” at the Upaya Zen Center in New Mexico. In her talk, Bateson, author of, among other books, the mini-classic on aging, Composing a Life, says that until very recently, “long life was always an aspiration, not an expectation.”
She then asks the audience a question I will now ask you: When you think of those three extra decades that we are playing with now, where do you imagine they go?
We still tend to tack them on to the end. I know I do. With my grandfather, for instance, I think of a man who went through infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, etcetera, like all the rest of us, but then, when he got to the age where he himself began describing himself as “old,” he just stayed and stayed. So now he’s been there for 43 years.
And while, in a way, this might be somewhat true for my grandfather — who lost both his mother and his father before he turned 10, and had no reason to believe he’d see something as outrageous as 103 himself — for my own generation, or even that of my parents, this dot-dot-dot-very looong dash pattern seems very far from how we are going about our life stages now, because we know our span has a good chance of being very long.
In order to explain the truth of how this new wedge — the 20th century’s gift of three decades — is affecting things, Bateson says we should think of what happens when you add a room to a house.
“If you add a room to the house that you live in with your family — say a basement, or, I don’t know, a penthouse — every single other room will be used differently. You’re not only adding something. The whole flow of life changes.”
It’s a simple, beautiful idea. The demographic change is not simply stacking a new block onto a few other blocks, it is a change that reverberates throughout an entire lifespan. It goes a long way in explaining some ways we are beginning to live now.
Things that might have seemed odd, or off, even 30 years ago, today seem more and more normal: people marrying and having their first kids in their late thirties or early forties;
youths extending adolescence to such an extent that they move back in with their parents after finishing university;
or card-carrying “Golden Agers” coping with the strange new dualistic world of great health at 65 and parents who need taking care of.
So in her talk in New Mexico, Bateson suggests we must ask not only questions about social security, or eldercare, but also, “How should we change our nursery school programs for people with 80 years ahead of them, when the program was designed for people with 45 years ahead of them?”
“Or we can look at marriage,” she continues. “This institution was invented when you could count on the other dying pretty soon.” Bateson is not at all surprised by the rates of divorce. She says something had to be invented “to replace death.”
(And I know it’s not a cuddly thing to write, but I can honestly say that I have been at not just one, but a number of 50th or 60th wedding anniversaries, where all the guests sit cooing around a couple who look absolutely exhausted by each other.
I have also seen 75-year-old widows positively flourish when their spouse of many decades passes. Too long is possible.)
Bateson suggests thinking of a new period of life. It comes about two thirds of the way through. She calls it “Adulthood II.” I have a few more birthdays — fate willing — before I get there.
It happens after regular adulthood and before senescence; it’s a time to use the wisdom you’ve gleaned throughout your life to benefit other generations.
That second part still might be a bit of wishful thinking. But I do think Bateson right when she says it’s a new room in the house.
And as for those other houses? Namely, my Aquarius turning to Capricorn by the power vested in Internet wave-maker Ophiucus? I’m not sure the same is true.
Sept. 29, 2017 "Me, myself, my marriage": Today I found this article by Courtney Shea in the Globe and Mail:
In his new book, The All-Or-Nothing Marriage, Northwestern University psychologist Eli Finkel explains how the modern institution has very little in common with matrimonial arrangements of yore.
The good news: Marriage today offers greater opportunities for fulfilment than ever before. The bad news: Good luck getting there.
Here, The Globe talks to Finkel about evolving ideals, whether best friends make the best spouses and why date night doesn’t work if you don’t do it right.
In your book, you say that self expression has replaced love as the marital ideal. How so?
Our expectations for marriage have changed so much over the past 200 years, but really the past 50 years. Increasingly, we look to our marriages to make us feel not only loved and loving, but also to help us grow into our ideal selves and to help us achieve our most challenging goals.
It used to be that we didn’t look to our spouses to help us achieve that many of our goals, and we certainly didn’t expect our spouse to be our best friend or to help launch us on a voyage of self-discovery and personal growth.
You also say that while the best marriages are better than ever, the average marriage is in crisis. Was it easier to be married before we expected a spouse to be a BFF?
That’s exactly right. We used to look to a lot of different people to help us meet our emotional and psychological needs.
As we’ve continued to pile on these expectations, a marriage that would have been considered fulfilling is no longer so.
Date nights are great, but how you use your date night has a pretty big influence on the consequences.
But then you can see that if you have a marriage that does fulfill those increased expectations – how that would be so satisfying.
How is it that marriage became such an island?
To a large extent, we started losing those larger social connections when society became suburban and people started moving away from their preexisting social networks to a place where they could afford a single-family home. Over time, people built a very nuclearized family life, which separated the mom and the dad from their siblings, friends and made them increasingly dependent on each other.
And then television made it easier to achieve entertainment in the home, which meant people were less likely to go out to socialize and participate in civic institutions.
How have evolving roles for women been good or bad for marriage?
They’ve mostly been good. When second-wave feminism launched in the 1960s, it was part of a stream of forces that pretty much shattered the 1950s model of marriage. This is the same time as civil rights, Vietnam protesting, birth control – a set of different movements that were all oriented around the theme that people should have the right to create their own destiny.
For marriage, the feminist movement meant that women increasingly entered the workplace, and ultimately that meant that men increasingly played a role in things like childcare.
This was so consequential, because when you fast forward a generation or two, you actually get two people in a marriage who can really understand what each other’s daily lives are like.
Try to imagine a stereotypical 1950s husband and wife – they can certainly cherish each other and love each other and respect each other, but how much empathy can they really have for each other’s daily experiences?
In this modern marriage model, a partner is supposed to be both a cheerleader and a critic. Aren’t those two roles in opposition to each other?
That is an absolutely massive challenge, especially since we really haven’t stopped to reflect on how marriage has changed and how tricky it is to be responsible for making our spouse feel loved and safe and sexy, while at the same time making sure that he or she understands and feels eager to change and grow.
How do you make the person feel happy with who they are, while also encouraging them to resist complacency and strive towards real excellence and personal growth?
I don’t have a definitive answer other than to say that if people are aware of what they are asking from their relationship, they can make more sensible decisions.
And one of those decisions could be that you don’t need your spouse to play all of those roles and you can look to other people in your life to help.
The book includes a collection of what you call marriage hacks. Do you have a favourite?
We did a study where we randomly assigned people in a relationship to think about conflict from the perspective of a neutral third party who wants the best for everybody – this allowed people to be less emotionally attached to their own points of view and we found that people who had done this over the course of a year ended up having happier and hotter marriages.
Let’s talk about hotter. Any tips on how to keep the flame alive?
How to sustain that heat in a long-term marriage is kind of the Holy Grail for relationship researchers.
In the book, I talk about techniques for increasing passion. I also talk about ways to figure out how we can ask less and reduce a sense of sexual disappointment, so there are two different approaches.
I’m more interested in the first approach.
Ha! Well a lot of people are given the advice that you should have date night, and it turns out that date nights are great, but how you use your date night has a pretty big influence on the consequences.
If you’re going to spend your date night watching reruns of a show you both like, that’s maybe good for overall relationship satisfaction, but it’s not going to help increase passion.
For that, you need to go outside the box and doing things that are new.
Do the novel ideas need to be innately sexy, or could you increase passion by couples bird watching?
Definitely you could. People often do try ballroom dancing, which I guess you could say is a sexy thing to do, but they also list things like shucking oysters.
Aren’t oysters an aphrodisiac?
That’s true, but I don’t think it mattered whether they ate them or not. What’s crucial is breaking up the mundanity or everydayness of marriage.
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