Marriage is a marathon, not a sprint.

PSYCHOLOGISTS use the phrase
“progressive menaces”
in their professional vocabulary.
This may seems an ideal
way to describe matrimony,

but it does convey the idea
that marriage is not static.
It is ever changing.
As with any normal relationship,
a couple continually faces changing situations
that require each person a new orientation,
a new pattern of reaction, a new way of facing life.

In individual lives,
our greatest years of productivity
usually come later in life.
Wayne Dennis at Brooklyn College
studied the lives of 156 well-known scientists
who lived beyond age of seventy.

He found that the decades of the forties
and fifties were their most productive.
The years of sixties and seventies,
while not as productive as the forties and fifties,
were years of high output.
But their twenties were their least productive years.

Four major poets
who lived beyond eighty
did more work in their last decade
than they did between twenty and thirty.
Tennyson was eighty when he wrote
“Crossing the Bar.” Michelangelo painted
The Last Judgment at age sixty.

The most satisfying and fulfilling years
of marriage are also likely to be later in life.
Make your marriage one for the “long haul”