Forever Valentine: Surviving the Slings and Arrows of Early Wedlock

By Yasmin Anwar

Gene and Barbara Ferguson have been married 39 years and counting. They joined UC Berkeley’s couples study in the 1980s. (Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Philip Ebener)

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage — and then what?

That was the question bugging UC Berkeley psychologist Robert Levenson in the 1980s when the U.S. divorce rate peaked at around 50 percent. So in 1989, he and fellow psychologists —  John Gottman at the University of Washington and Stanford University’s Laura Carstensen — launched a longitudinal study of 156 middle-aged and older couples in the San Francisco Bay Area who had survived the slings and arrows of early wedlock, and were in it for the long haul.

“It was Berkeley, and the chance to be part of something big,” recalls Levenson about why the couples, recruited from senior centers, churches, fliers at BART stations and newspaper ads, joined the study. Each five years, the couples came to the Berkeley campus to share their marital ups and downs while researchers videotaped them and coded their conversations based on their facial expressions, body language, tones of voice and topics of discussion.

Today, the spouses are in their 60s, 70s, 80s and even 90s — a few have divorced, a few are on their second marriages, a few have died — and Levenson’s 25-year look at marriage in middle and late life is winding down. But the data will live on. Among other things, the study has found that couples who say “we” have a better shot at resolving conflict, that DNA is linked to marital satisfaction and that wives matter more when it comes to calming marital conflict.

Here’s what Levenson, 65, has to say about what he learned.

Does the story about long-term marriage have a happy ending?

The emotional story for long-tern marriages is really quite positive. People who get through the first 15 years of marriage learn to value each other. They don’t have a lot of contempt for one another. They accept each other. They take pride in one another’s accomplishments. There’s this genuine respect for one another. They are no longer engaged in futile attempts to change one another.