Want to have a long marriage like Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward did?
Well, the right thing to say to your wife in the midst of an argument could be as simple as this: "Honey, let's not get upset. When our brains age, we'll become more adoring companions."
Alternatively, you could say, "Just think of all the emotional-attachment synapses we'll be laying down in our brains if we make it to our 25th anniversary."
Who knows? You, too, could have a 50-year happy marriage like Mr. Newman, the Hollywood legend whose greatness behind the scenes received just as many accolades, if not more, than his acting career when he died last week at the age of 83.
He is iconic for his husband-hood in an age when marriage is increasingly seen as a rite of temporary and convenient passage - one you glide through and leave as you might a party you'd thought you'd enjoy - not just in the Los Angeles hotbed of sex, beauty and ambition, but in the culture at large.
Mr. Newman rarely discussed his marriage. To Playboy magazine, he once explained his marital fidelity by saying he didn't need to go out for hamburger when he had steak at home.
But usually, he would politely say "I don't like to discuss that" when interviewers pressed for the secrets of his long, happy marriage.
But now, there is scientific and psychological insight into the benefits of long-term marriage, and the reasons why marriages that survive often become better as they age. In the long run, marriage is a state of being that suits, even enhances, human biology, experts say.
"There are biological changes that occur in aging in the so-called 'blue spot' of the brain, an area that has to do with anger, aggression, anxiety. That area literally loses neurons as we age," which means those emotions are less acute, explains Maggie Scarf, a therapist and author of several books including September Songs: The Good News About Marriage in the Later Years.
Ms. Scarf uses this and other research to explain the surprising evidence she found in interviews with couples aged 50 to 75 that sticking out a marriage, even a contentious one, brings a level of happiness that few of the participants could have predicted earlier on.
"There was still a source of annoyance and irritation. It was just that it was handled in a different way. The intensity of their conflict never reached the rage stage."
It's a comforting thought: We may be wired to fall in love, but we are also de-wired to get along in our dotage.
There is also a psychological shift among older couples that makes marriage easier and better, she says. "As people age, there is an unconscious or maybe conscious motivation to move toward the 'positivity effect,' " she says, citing medical research from Stanford University in California. "People realize that more years of their life have passed than are ahead. Time is like an oil supply that is running out, and as it runs out it becomes more valuable, and people think about how to use that time in a way that makes them happy."
Ms. Scarf is not advocating that people stay in marriages that are truly miserable. "There are real reasons why people divorce," she acknowledges. But she thinks that couples need to know the benefits in store if they ride out the bad patches.
"Marriage is a journey, and things turn around," says Ms. Scarf, a wife of 55 years, mother of three children, and grandmother of eight. She and her husband haven't "floated here on a cloud of bliss" she says of the long marriage that gives her pleasure and meaning.
