Baby Boomer Marriages Heading Toward Everlasting Status?
With the senior baby boomers reaching their early sixties, an everlasting marriage
may be in sight. In 2003, two 29-year old bachelors, Mathew Boggs and Jason
Miller, began a project of interviewing 100 couples in California who had been
married 40 years or longer. In the summer of 2006, the began a 12,000 mile journey
across the United States to discover and interview more couples with long-lasting
marriage relationships.
The authors interviewed longtime married couples who are still together and
love each other for many years with marriages that are thriving. Good marriages
last because of shared good times and perseverance in difficult tests and trials.
These marriages serve as examples to baby boomers who are wed for years or even
on the verge of divorce. The project resulted in a documentary and a new book,
“Project Everlasting: Two Bachelors Discover the Secrets of America’s Greatest
Marriages.”
Here are some of the marriage tips from the married couples, as featured in
a Newsday article by Pat Burson. Gerry and Richard Jacobson are best friends:
Says Richard: "We have connections and talk about things that happened
yesterday and 45 years ago. I mean those connections are invaluable." Eddie
and Ruth Elcott of Los Angeles, were separated for the first two years of their
63-year marriage.
Commitment, they told the writers, is a key to an enduring marriage. Other
“marriage masters” told them some couples don’t last because they are too focused
on instant gratification and others need to learn that love is not as much an
emotion as a decision. “They say love is a four-letter word spelled g-i-v-e.”
“Act loving, even when you don’t feel in love. By being generous and putting
the other person first, the feeling of love will follow those behaviors.
Baby boomer marriage relationships can mimic these experienced couples and
have their own project everlasting during their senior years together.
