In the year 1900, the average person’s life expectancy was a brief 47.6 years. By the beginning of the 21st century, average male life expectancy at birth was 73.6 years and average female life expectancy at birth was 79.4 years. These numbers averaged out at 76.5 years for both sexes in the year 1997 (and that figure has been slowly climbing ever since; it is now 77.6). In what might be seen as the twinkle of a historical eye, the human life-span had become almost three decades longer. For the first time in the history of our species, the majority of people in the Western world can now expect to survive into old age. The enormity of this advance is unprecedented; and indeed, a new stage has been added to the life-cycle.

Years ago, when I published my first book on marriage, Intimate Partners: patterns in love and marriage, the oldest pair among the couples described in those pages was in their late forties at the time. And I did get a certain amount of flak about that! A number of marital partners wrote to me and said that “By the way, life doesn’t end at age 50. What about couples who are older, like us?” I recognized the validity of the complaint, but put the matter on hold for a while...a long while...actually, for some twenty years. And by the time I got around to it, just recently, I was struck by how little was known about spouses in their fifties and sixties—the latter being a huge group of people, the leading edge of the baby boom.

So I began researching these couples in later adulthood in my usual way—by talking to experts (the few experts that were studying this group); by reading whatever relevant studies were available; and most importantly of all, talking to older spouses themselves.

These interviews took me by surprise. Most of my career has, in fact, been devoted to dealing with people—individuals, couples and families - who are in various sorts kinds of psychological difficulties. But this research propelled me in an entirely different direction. The marital partners I was talking with (and I include couples whom I’d interviewed twenty years earlier, who were not doing very well at the time) appeared to be at a very good place in their lives.

I don’t mean to suggest that the spouses I was interviewing were not beginning to deal with—or had not already dealt with—a number of demanding concerns. I knew this to be the case from my own life. These partners were confronting large questions having to do with retirement, relocation, family connections—and most crucially, with what things mattered most when the time left to live is shorter than the time that has already gone by. So these couples did have big and sometimes confusing issues to negotiate. The important difference that I sensed (and again, experienced myself) was that the partners seemed to be on the same page as they went about resolving them.

In September Songs I offer the latest research on later adulthood and a series of subjective portrayals of couples in their fifties and over—that is, of marital partners in this new and relatively unexplored stage of living, the additional two to three decades that have made their almost magical appearance in the average span of the human life-cycle.