Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now

by Gordon Livingston

When I listen to comments from elderly people who have been married fifty, sixty, or more years answering the inevitable question about “the secret to a successful marriage,” it seems to me that a high tolerance for boredom often heads the list. Such bromides as “We never went to bed angry” or “Moderation in all things” convey a philosophy more geared to survival than to pleasure. Where, one wonders, is the idea of endless, renewable love? If Adam and Eve have anything to teach us with their spectacular fall from grace it is that the union of two people offers us the primary compensation for all the burdens of being human: the need to toil, the “thorns and thistles,” and the lifelong knowledge of our mortality.