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The story of Kathy and Bill’s successful marriage underscores for me the importance of having healthy boundaries, a life outside the relationship, and a willingness to work at it at all stages along the way—that and good sex!

Another long-term relationship that exemplifies these things is the forty-six-year marriage of Nat and Jewelle Bickford. Nat’s the chap you met in
Chapter 10
who wrote his life story and purged his ghosts. He was sixty-six when I interviewed him and Jewelle was sixty-four. I first met her at a Women in the Global South seminar at the Council on Foreign Relations. Somewhat cowed by the fact that her background is in assets securitization and that she was, at the time of our meeting, the highest-ranking woman at Rothschild bank, I didn’t anticipate getting to know her and her family and still can’t quite believe that I have a friend who has been a banker. One thing I hadn’t known about Jewelle until the interview was that when her daughters were young she was a stay-at-home wife and mother, doing all the cooking and housework. Only when the girls turned sixteen and nineteen did she, at age thirty-eight, go back to college—Sarah Lawrence.

Just-married Nat and Jewelle Bickford.

Jewelle and Nat with their daughters, Laura and Emily.

“Nat was the one who said, ‘You are too smart not to be college-educated,’ ” Jewelle told me with evident appreciation in her voice. “At that time it was really hard for him to pay for the two kids in private school and my college education, but he felt it was absolutely essential.” My admiration for the two of them grew immensely at the idea that her amazing career didn’t start till midlife and that he wasn’t at all threatened by her morphing from mom to career woman.

The longevity of their marriage is proof that people with loveless childhoods can beat the odds and have a happy marriage. Nat and Jewelle focused on spending time together, on sensuality, and on compromise. Jewelle thinks one reason why they married so young was that it provided a way out of their parents’ homes. I find their compatibility surprising because they are so utterly different: It’s Ferdinand the Bull married to the Little Engine That Could in high gear. Jewelle put it this way: “Nat’s the rudder and I’m the engine.” He said, “We are the reverse sides of a coin. She’s got a tremendous amount of energy, I have a medium amount. She is, let’s see, self-directed, proactive, spontaneous, intuitive. These are not words I use to describe myself. I am more reflective, less spontaneous. I just need time to think about things.”

Although they are temperamentally polar opposites, several things are clear about Nat and Jewelle right off the bat. For one, their marriage has been a priority for them. “We always made time for each other,” Nat said, “even when we had the kids. We couldn’t go away a lot, so we took advantage of the fact that we had two sets of grandparents, both of which were willing to take the kids. So we had some rest from the grind on weekends. And we’ve always liked talking to each other.”

It’s also apparent that there is a lot of physical chemistry between them; it’s been that way, according to Nat, from the start. He recalled, “I had a date for a football weekend at Harvard and my date was bringing a chaperone, so I arranged a date for the chaperone and, to bribe him, I got him tickets to the game. Well, Jewelle was the chaperone, and when I laid eyes on her I told my friend, ‘Forget the tickets, you won’t see her. I am going to take her home for seventy-two hours and you won’t see her again.’ ”

I asked Jewelle how they kept the sensuality going all these years. “People don’t have good long-term sexual relationships who don’t have good psychological relationships,” she said. “Consistently good lovemaking to the same person doesn’t come from exciting techniques but from mental stimulation and excitement.” She described to me the beauty of getting sexually turned on by and making love with someone whom you’ve shared so much life with. “You can’t imagine, Jane, how fantastically special it is. There’s a different kind of richness to it that’s way deeper than when you’re young and it’s new.” I can only catch a whiff of what that must feel like, and this is a big regret for me. For me, it will never be “the long haul.”

I asked Nat if they’ve had major differences over the years, and what’s changed now that they are in their Third Acts. “One of our major differences was the children,” he said. “I am much more laissez-faire than she is. She is a believer in setting boundaries far beyond me, and that produced a lot of friction from time to time.”

“It was terrible, just terrible” was Jewelle’s description of it. “He thought girls didn’t get into trouble. Isn’t that amazing? And he wanted to be their friend and not their disciplinarian, so we fought a lot over it.” What this meant, though, is that unlike couples who suffer when the children leave home, Nat and Jewelle found that the empty nest meant that a source of tension was removed. Though they love their daughters immensely, that’s when, they say, they started really enjoying themselves, sharing a common interest in all the cultural riches New York has to offer.

In 2004 Nat retired from his law practice while Jewelle continued working. I asked her if this caused problems, the way it has for some couples. “Yes!” she exclaimed. “In the first place, he totally took over my kitchen. I like to cook, and it was just a mess. There were stacks of books and papers, and he had an office and never went to it.”

Although he was retired, Nat’s law firm had given him an office and a secretary for his use—hoping, perhaps, that he would stay involved with clients on some level.

“I know it was annoying to Jewelle,” Nat told me. “Why didn’t I use it? Why did I have to hang out in the kitchen? There were times when I felt sort of sheepish about not going to the office. I felt this tremendous internal barrier—I just didn’t want to go back there. I knew I would get involved in something. When I left that firm for the last day, I was just happy to go.”

These seemingly small issues have brought storms to many a calm sea. One retired husband I read about thought he was doing his wife a big favor when he reorganized all her kitchen cupboards while she was away on business. Needless to say, she pitched a fit. What Jewelle did was get them to see a couples counselor and, according to Jewelle, this woman helped both of them. Nat was able to see that invading Jewelle’s space and avoiding making a decision about where to do his work and put his stuff was a passive-aggressive act. “After that,” said Jewelle, “a lightbulb went off, he came home and, in two days, totally filed everything, and I had my kitchen back.”

The therapist helped Jewelle see ways that she, too, can avoid problems. “As you know,” Jewelle said, “Nat and I are very different, and now that he’s home more, certain things bother me. I’ve been wanting him to not depend so much on me for social life and for intimacy. I think he should have lunch with more of his friends, but the therapist said, ‘That is not your business, Jewelle. Lay off. Quite frankly, you have to pick the things that matter most to you.’ So, I started thinking about the things that really did not matter to me and I have been laying off.”

“Has this relieved the tension?” I asked.

“Yes, it has,” Jewelle replied with relief.

Like most women I have talked to, menopause was freeing for Jewelle. “In some weird way I got much more self-confidence,” she told me. “I don’t know whether it was hormonal or just age. But my fifties were the beginning of when I started feeling good about myself.”

When I told her that the writer Suzanne Braun Levine calls that decade the “Fuck-You Fifties,” Jewelle said, “Absolutely! I stopped caring so much how they view me.”

“ ‘They’ as in the men you work with at the bank?”

“Yes. That doesn’t mean that I don’t want to get along with them at work. You have to get along in whatever environment you are in. But you can choose which environments you want to be in. That was a real eye-opener for me.”

Nat and Jewell’s marriage is a demonstration of how individuation and andogenization—gender balancing—can deepen a couple’s bonds. Generativity and passionate involvement have also had a role to play. Jewelle retired from banking in 2009. She is now working with GenSpring, a firm that focuses on wealth management, but is, nonetheless, able to spend more time with her family and grandchildren and to work with the international nonprofit organization Women for Women International, which links women in the developed world to individual women in the Global South and helps them become economically self-sufficient, primarily through microenterprise.
¹⁴

“There’s no question that for marital longevity, there needs to be romance. Nat and I work to keep our romance alive,” Jewelle told me. While Jewelle has narrowed her professional life and looks to bring her skills and energy to her work with international women’s organizations, Nat has unleashed his long-hidden passion for music. He always wanted to be a composer but, knowing that his strict, emotionally remote father would never support that ambition, he set it aside for the law.

“All my life what I have done is play the piano for myself and make up things,” Nat confided, and I could hear the timbre of his voice change and the desire bleed through. “Music is my passion.”

Option to Renew

In
Chapter 16
I will talk about my friends Eva and Yoel Haller, both seventy-seven years old when I interviewed them and married for twenty years. It’s his third marriage and her fifth. She calls her first three go-rounds her “training bra” marriages. Between them they have ten children and fifteen grandchildren.

They were each fifty-seven years old when they met in the back of a bus going from the famous Rancho La Puerto spa in Tecate, Mexico, to San Diego. “By the time I got off the bus,” Yoel told me, “I knew I was going to marry her.”

Eva hadn’t really wanted to get married again, feeling that it was too much of a commitment, but he pressed her and they married six months later. Now, as she looks back, she’s glad they did. She noted, “There is something about that deeper commitment—that we will spend the rest of our living days together.”

She told me that as a widow, what she missed most about being married was the “conspiracy.” When I asked her to explain, she said, “I missed a partner with whom I could share the conspiracy, the delicious nonverbal conspiracy. You know, in the midst of a party, the quiet look between us which assures us that we are together. This, for me, is the essence of togetherness, of love.”

Both Yoel and Eva evidence another characteristic of successful aging—what George Vaillant calls “future orientation: the ability to anticipate, plan and hope.”
¹⁵
Yoel explained, “We sold our big home in Santa Barbara. We want to scale down. We don’t want to think about stuff.” But they have invested in a retirement home there that includes total care, for when that time comes. “We may never go there,” Eva said, “but we have it just in case. I never thought I’d live to be eighty, but then I realized that’s only two and a half years from now, so I’ve revised the formula. I now want to think of five years—a five-year plan.”

To which Yoel added, “We have a thirty-year marriage contract with an option to renew.” So that means that in ten years, at eighty-seven, they’ll draw up a new contract. My guess is they’ll have a big party—and I’ll be there!

CHAPTER 13

The Changing Landscape of Sex When You’re Over the Hill

On seeing a beautiful woman, a ninety-something Oliver Wendell Holmes is said to have commented, “Oh, to be seventy again!”

I
DON’T THINK THAT 101-YEAR-OLD, BANJO-PLAYING BEN BURKE, whom I wrote about in
Chapter 11
, lamented over not being seventy anymore. When I interviewed him at an attractive condominium for seniors in Atlanta, Georgia, he told me about his girlfriend, Jocelyn.