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KARL PILLEMER: What I was going to do is for a little while, I'd like to give you an overview of the project on which this was based, which did involve, in the end, to be the largest in-depth interview study of long-married people ever conducted, with an average length of marriage of about 43 years. So I'd like to tell you about the study and how I got into it, if that's all right.
So rather than completely brief, I may go 20-ish or 20 minutes. But do feel free to interrupt. And I wanted to introduce you to some of the participants in the project, because we have some great videos of them, and try to give you an idea of the flavor of their wisdom on this topic.
And so I would say to begin this project for me was one of the most extraordinary of my academic career. Just on a personal level, to expand on what Sil said, about 10 years ago, I had something of a revelation that after 25 years as a gerontologist, I realized I was studying and focused almost exclusively on the problems of older people and old people as problems.
So I was studying things like chronic pain, elder abuse, dementia, nursing homes. It actually began to seem like I was rewriting the book of Job for old people, basically. And that's what our society does as well. It treats people as old and sick and frail, and now they're busting the federal budget to boot. It's this notion that they're problems.
And at the same time, I was meeting in my work dozens of happy, healthy, vibrant, energetic people in their 80s and 90s and beyond. And I was also reading research, which I don't talk about much here, but I will say it briefly. And you may have read it because David Brooks recently did a column on it.
There's really sound research showing that if you use regular survey methods, older people are happier than younger people. So they report higher rates of well-being, that the last 10 years or 5 years of their lives were the happiest period of their lives. And so I began to ask myself, what's that all about?
And the idea hit me is, could we go to the oldest Americans, who in the book I call the wisest Americans, and find out what they know about living a happy, healthier, and more fulfilled life that young people don't? And in part, what we forget-- that it's only been in the last 100 years or so that people have ever gone to anyone other than the oldest person they knew for advice. So this is a very natural sort of human thing to do.
And also, I was really struck by how little research there was on it. There hadn't been any research. And that seemed like a great thing to look at.
So I used in these studies good, sound social science methods. And I'll talk about those in a minute. And from hundreds of interviews-- all told, it was interviews with over 700 older people-- I distilled what I've called these lessons for loving.
And the other thing I'll say is usually, as an academic, before my first book, which was sort of-- which also used the same methods-- and I want to say this from a Cornell perspective. Everything else I'd basically ever written was usual turgid academic prose. And I consciously and deliberately chose this vehicle of a self-help or of an advice book because it seemed to be a way to get to people who might not actually otherwise consider aging or think about aging.
So I really did this deliberately to try to use these social science methods but get it into a form that people might find useful as part of this goal of really enriching people's thoughts about aging. So I had an absolutely extraordinary time.
I had the opportunity to sit down with very old people. The oldest person in all these studies was 108 and was somebody who was really doing well. My best quote from her-- "Let's see, when did I start my first job? I've always remembered because it was the day that World War I ended."
And they were profound. They were funny. And I got to ask them things like these questions about marriage and their core values and other issues.
Before I go any further, I'd like to take a minute and give you a sense of what it was like to actually do this so you can have a sense of what it might feel like or what a very old person might say in answer to these questions. And I started every interview-- even though it was a much more detailed and structured interview, every interview began with the question, as you look back over your life, and in some cases, very long life, what are the most important lessons about love and relationships and marriage that you would like to pass on to younger people?
And that started this whole series of reflections. And the questions we used are not completely in the book. There are some. And if you would like the questionnaire, I can certainly get it to you.
And one interview who stuck with me was a woman named Kitty who is 94 now, probably has turned 95. She had a very adventurous young life. She was a WAVE in World War II, the Women's Naval Corps. She was married for 60 years, and she was very candid that her marriage initially was very difficult.
Her husband uprooted her and moved her to the oil fields. She was an urban person. She said, I left him in my mind hundreds of times. But she stayed together and made the relationship really work.
And they had 20 or 30 really good years at the end. And I'll come back to her at the end of this presentation. But here's an example, and a pretty typical one, of how someone might answer these questions.
SPEAKER 1: So I felt footloose and fancy free. I was in uniform. The war was over. Everybody was happy getting on with their lives.
And I thought, well, I'll go out with Chuck, but it'll only be because he's good company. Well, I found out he was more than just good company.
Be prepared to come into this for a lifetime. It's the most important decision you'll make in your life. And don't give up too easily. There are always surprises.
And just don't give in to too much shock or having hurt feelings. Be sure to sit down and work it out with the person you love.
Open up. Loosen up. [LAUGHS] Don't take it too seriously. Always keep a sense of humor, even when it was pretty rough. You don't want to start feeling so sorry for yourself.
I would say hang in there when it got tough. Really don't expect things to happen overnight. They don't.
Remember the things you loved about this man when you met him and fell in love with him. Realize that the marriage can grow and become more beautiful, really, and that you can be happier than you ever dreamed of.
KARL PILLEMER: And so that was the kind of thing. And let me share with you-- but I think you can see that there was-- it's been a hard project to have end because this was so enjoyable. It's a remarkable trip talking to some of these very old people, and a little like entering a time machine at times.
And this all then led me to this Marriage Advice Project. And let me just share a few things, and then we can talk. One question I would like to touch on is, why should we consult the oldest Americans about love and marriage?
And there would be several concerns about that. First of all, weren't their experiences too vastly different to even be relevant to young people? Really, if you look at seismic changes in love and marriage, people today, unlike these elders, don't wait until they're married to have their first intimate experience.
Many more women work outside the home. Our rates of marriage have declined, and people are getting married later. And then, on top of all this, we have the internet and social media.
And I would argue that in fact, in the famous words of the Humphrey Bogart movie, that truly the fundamental things do apply, that much of what they have to offer is extraordinarily relevant. And let me say there were two-- there were a couple of ways in which I know this.
First, I did a series of focus groups in preparation for this book. So those of you with Cornell connections, I met in the basement of Rulloff's Student Bar with eight fraternity brothers. I met with young professionals in New York City with women who were in book clubs, men, parents of young children.
And the fundamental questions were identical. I asked them, what would you like to know from these very old people and very long-married people? And the questions, I think, were almost identical to what you would find 100 years ago or 50 years ago or even in Jane Austen's time. How, out of a couple of billion people, do I select this one person with whom I can be happy for a lifetime?
What are the major ways that we can communicate better and avoid conflict or at least deal with it better? And most important, and something that I think the oldest Americans are uniquely placed to answer for us, is, how do we keep it interesting and lively over decades? So how does a marriage stay this rich and sort of beautiful experience?
Also, I want to say, in terms of relevance, if you look at survey data, young people today-- so people in their 20s-- want almost precisely out of marriage that people have for as long as people have done surveys. Namely, almost 100% of people in their 20s-- and these are fairly recent surveys-- say they want to get married.
Most of them believe that they would like to be faithful to one person for their entire life. So they strongly emphasize marital faithfulness. And they do view it as a lifelong commitment.
So even though things are changing, young people are interested in marriage. There's no sense of marriage being dead. And I think that's a critical point, and it's why the advice of older people are so valuable.
And the final thing I do want to say, at the risk of getting on a little soapbox, is there are certain advantages to looking back over one's lifetime. It's not a mystery how things have turned out, because they've already turned out. And you can look back and reflect on it.
But also, problems affecting young people today also affected these oldest Americans. But for them, it was worse. So it struck me as I was thinking about this project as absurd that as couples are struggling to keep their balance in the second-worst downturn in American history, that no one was asking the people who went through the worst downturn in American history. And there's so much relevant information there. It seemed important.
Let me share just a little bit about how the study was done. If you're interested, I am very happy to respond to questions about it. But there were three-- there were three main data collection efforts. And even though the book isn't written like a social science study, all of the methods were sound social science.
First, just to get the lay of the land, since there hadn't been much research on this, we did a self-report survey, and folks could write in their lessons for marriage and relationships. But I really wanted an unbiased sample. Obviously, there's something that's going to be a little different from someone who feels motivated to write in their lessons about marriage.
So with the help of Cornell's Institute for Survey Research, I did a true random-sample survey of the US, where we contacted people by phone and then did in-depth interviews over the telephone. I can't resist sharing one small anecdote because what happened is you could be sitting in your living room if you were a 70-year-old or over, and somebody would call and say, hi, I'm calling from Cornell's Institute for Survey Research. I want to talk to you about your life lessons.
And one man did say, I'll tell you my life lesson is not to answer goddamn telephone surveys-- and, of course, our research assistant came running to us very quickly. You know, tell me about that. But in general, older people have very high rates of response to surveys. So it's a very positive thing.
Another thing I wanted to do-- there have been a few small-scale studies of this. And if you look at books in the bookstore, either they are typically a small number, or one, like a celebrity or a motivational speaker's, account of their great happy marriage, or they're psychotherapists who are writing about troubled marriages.
And I wanted, really, both pictures. I wanted people who were in long, happy marriages. But also, I wanted people who wound up, after three divorces, lonely and unhappy in later life. The idea is that they would have good advice for people as to what not to do. So it includes elders who encountered very serious relationship challenges as well as those who felt they were in very happy relationships.
Another thing that characterized the study is we did what we say in social science was an oversampling of African American elders. And so they're overly represented because we wanted to make sure we had a very diverse population. There's a real New York City focus of this because I interviewed-- in one way or another, it probably comes to around 100 people from New York City senior centers or from other locations like that, in Chinatown, in the South Bronx, in Harlem.
And that got us a lot of in-depth information about an even more diverse group. We also worked with an organization of older gays and lesbians in New York City and did special recruitment of long-term same-sex couples, which, as an aside, if I blinded the names and genders of our respondents, you would find essentially no differences at all between long-term same-sex couples and heterosexual couples in terms of the kind of lessons they offer. How they got there is a little different, but it was remarkably similar.
So let me spend the rest of my time briefly-- it's very challenging because there were hundreds of lessons, and I distilled them down to 30. And I only want to take time to share just a few of them with you. But I'd like to give you the gist of it and then would love to have your questions.
And, really, what I have done in trying to convey this is to identify a few core themes of elder wisdom. And honestly, doing all the data analysis of this many folks, perhaps it's wisdom of crowds or something along those lines, but there definitely are several overarching themes that very strongly relate to looking back from the end of life-- so I would say this kind of a lens through which older people see love and marriage.
And then I'm going to give you a couple of examples under each one from this generalization. Is that showing up there? The first thing is-- and I discussed this in my first book, and there's a lot of research on this. And I'll take a minute to share it.
One thing-- so if you ask yourself, what makes older people different from younger people? What's something that, in terms of human development, of where they are on a developmental trajectory, what really makes them different?
And the researchers have found that one thing clearly is the strong sense of a limited time horizon, that a 20-something or a 30-something-- all of you I'm sure have heard this-- has a close friend die. And the person says, I'm going to stop and smell the roses now. But two or three days later, they're back to doing whatever they were doing.
Older people don't have that luxury. And it results in something that social scientists call "socioemotional selectivity," which is a great term to use. But it basically says older people come to regulate their emotions better, and they come to be more selective. So their sense of a limited time horizon doesn't depress them as much as it helps them make better choices.
And one of the working hypotheses of this book is that younger people can benefit from this viewpoint, that by being aware of how limited their time on Earth is, even if it's artificially making them aware, they too can make better choices.
So this was a common theme, the idea of time and taking the long view. One of my favorite quotes is, as one woman told me, "I don't know what happened, because the next thing you know, you're 100." And that was really kind of the sense. The oldest people were the most likely to say, I can't believe how quickly life passed, and that sort of thing.
So what would one do with that, or what does that long view mean? And just to give an example, one of the strongest pieces of advice was one also where the elders refused to provide any wiggle room on. And that was the idea of getting married based on a plan to change your partner.
They argued-- this view was equally strong among all groups-- African Americans, Hispanics, whites, gay people, straight people, the 60-year-olds, and the centenarians. Making your partner a self-help project is a recipe for failure. And it was also remarkable the vehemence with which people expressed it.
So 80 and 90-year-olds would either literally or figuratively pound their fist on the table and say, if you get married planning to change someone, you're an idiot, or you're a fool. And they actually even came up as I was going through this with sort of a top 10 list of things that you may tell yourself about your partner that won't ever come true, like after we're married, he'll lose that gut and I'll get him to the gym, or she'll like my family, that sort of thing.
But that's something, too, that comes-- there were many others. Yeah, she hates my family now, but they'll grow on her. They argue that this is absolutely critical is to give up the sense of trying to change your partner. And that comes from their own experience of having done it and watching their children and their grandchildren.
A second one, I think, which also comes from this long view goes like this. One very-- I like to say, or I can say that I have spent more time talking to very old people about sex than probably anybody else I've ever known. And they are extremely candid about the importance of a physical attraction early on in the relationship.
It's not like they're looking for inner beauty only. Everybody said that the way they met their partner of many years, there was a spark. There was a fire that ignited. But almost as soon as they said that-- so almost in the same breath, and this happened over and over-- the elders said, but there has to be something more, that there's no way that heart-throbbing passion and the physical and sexual attraction are going to keep the relationship going over the long term.
So no sooner had they announced how important it was to have the physical attraction, they also wanted you to move beyond. If this doesn't morph into something else, if it doesn't take on the qualities of friendship, including the comfortable ability to hang out, the sharing of mutual interests, easy conversation, positive and enjoyable interactions, you won't make it for over this long period of time.
So essentially, everybody described this transition in which the ratio of friendship to passionate love becomes larger. And not that passion never dies out, but people felt that was important.
This kind of second area is something also that I think is related to this idea of the long view. And their concept around this is something that's also backed up by research. And there has been some really good research on this. So it's where elder wisdom and research really map on to one another.
One thing they told me, not precisely in these terms, but along these lines, is that marriage is made up of hundreds or thousands of micro-interactions over even the course of a given day. And in each of those little interactions, people have the choice to be positive, cheerful, or supportive or not.
I mentioned research, and there's been research around the factor of 10, that someone's actually quantified that it takes approximately 10 positive interactions to overcome a single nasty one in a relationship over the course of a day, say. This is so strong for them.
They say, you know, don't look at the big-ticket items as much as doing, for example, small and positive unexpected things for one spouse. And they gave a whole range of examples-- for example, doing someone else's chore. If you have a rigid division of labor in your household, spontaneously do the chore of the other person.
And one person said to me, if the dog is scratching at the bedroom door at 6:00 AM on a rainy morning, and it's your partner's turn to walk the dog, get up and do it. It's money in the bank. A number of women did say-- and they may have been quoting someone, but it was surprising that there were several of them who said that their husbands doing the dishes was the most powerful aphrodisiac they could think of, this concept of someone stepping in and doing things.
So they argue in terms of giving small gifts throughout the week or the day and that the buildup of these positive gestures can have a transformative impact on marriage. And this, again, was men as well as women.
And I think the third-- and I'll pretty much stop after this-- is the concept of lightening up. And that comes very specifically from the view at the end of life that-- and I would say over and over, an enduring theme was as you're involved in your relationship, relaxing, embracing humor, easy forgiveness, that these kind of things are stress busters that make for a very long-term relationship.
And they pointed out, and especially people whose marriages had dissolved pointed out that an oppressive heaviness would overtake the relationship, that there was sort of a grayness that would kind of move in. Many of them talked about something they called the middle-age blur, or something along those lines, where you're so involved in childrearing and work that everything else in the relationship goes out the window, for example.
So they argue that the way that you can get around some of these is to ask yourself, or be aware of the relationship becoming grim and serious and the fun leaving it, where sort of nothing is ignored and everything is taken seriously.
And so one piece of that was to ask yourself if it's worth it. And now this may sound a little like a cliche. But having heard it you from 700 people, when you ask yourself the question, is this argument going to make any difference to me when I'm 80, the answer is almost certainly no. It's just not.
And their point, after eight or more decades of living and six or seven or more decades of marriage, is a fundamental point, that most of what husbands and wives get in arguments or fight about is simply not worth it. It's like the Seinfeld line. It's mostly about nothing. It's someone being irritated or upset for no reason.
So the idea is to balance that specific disagreement against love for your partner. And let me show you one more. This is Paul. And the one thing that you need to know is Paul is 90, and his wife, Blossom, is 91. So she's a year older, if I'm recalling correctly. And it makes something interesting in terms of what he says.
PAUL: I go along with almost anything Blossom wants to do as long as there's no danger involved.
Well, if your spouse says something that would anger you, I will say swallow the anger unless, as I said, there's danger involved.
You can't be angry and choose your [INAUDIBLE], as they say.
KARL PILLEMER: One of my--
AUDIENCE: He's in the same place, right?
KARL PILLEMER: Yeah, he is. These ones you're seeing are all-- yeah. We don't want to say the name because of confidentiality purposes. But that's correct.
AUDIENCE: So these are pseudonyms.
KARL PILLEMER: No, actually, these are their first names.
AUDIENCE: First names.
KARL PILLEMER: I neglected to ask what Blossom might want to do that was dangerous. That's a regret. Yeah, actually, I will say, by the way, everybody did give complete permission to use their interviews. And this was a study, unlike a lot of the ones that we do scientifically, where people weren't promised confidentiality.
So they were told that someone could recognize them by their quotes. We still do use pseudonyms in the book. So all the names in the book are pseudonyms that are chosen by a random name generator. Yes, there is such a thing.
And I typically use only the first names of folks in the videos, even though they did agree to do it. So I think there's that sense. And among some other ones, this notion of giving up grudges-- I heard, as if it were part of a data bank that everybody over 75 has access to, the expression "don't go to bed angry" over and over and over again.
And this is what-- I would make the point that even things that these folks said that sounded a little like cliches, if I drilled down into them, actually had sort of an interesting or unusual aspect to it. But I would guarantee you if you chose a person over 75 and said, give me your three top lessons for a good marriage, I'll bet you almost anything that one of those three is "don't go to bed angry."
So I really wanted to understand what actually that was by about the 200th time I'd heard that statement. And I understood that it really is this concept of not holding a grudge. As you would talk to them, they pointed out that going to bed angry is a warning sign for a great relationship danger. And that is holding grudges over days or for a long period of time.
And their argument is there are fewer things that are more sure to extinguish the spark of marital happiness then a simmering fight that continues over days or weeks. But one woman who was 92, married to a 93-year-old man for 71 years, said something that really stuck with me. And that was an image of cleaning out each day.
She said, clean out each day as it comes along. Try to clean out each day so when you shut your eyes at night, you've cleaned out everything. And that was a sense of it.
And let me come-- and let me finish by saying-- that we were talking about this a bit earlier before we started our session. But there are many hopeful things in this study for me. And I think it's why looking at long-married elders was so valuable.
It is not that everything is so wonderful. Many of the people I interviewed are dealing with health problems, struggling with other issues. And that marriage is hard for a lifetime, there's no question. But for a lot of people, it truly was a sublime experience, something that even as a writer, I usually don't have that much trouble writing about. But it was very difficult almost to convey how good this is for older people and that it is a realistic possibility for younger people.
So I think that's one theme. And I want to leave you with one example of this hopefulness because one thing a number of the elders did say, you know, is don't give up on love. And I did a number of interviews in assisted living facilities, and it was really surprising how many people found a new partner.
I want to come back to Kitty, who you'll recall had had this difficult but then ultimately very satisfying marriage. She cared for her husband at the end of his life. She moved to New York from the West Coast and really thought this phase of her life was over.
And here's what she told me, and this was one of my favorite discussions I had.
KITTY: Oh, yes, I have a fabulous boyfriend. Suddenly, this fellow appeared from nowhere, a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. And he's been really the nicest man I've ever met.
I'm older than he is by five years. They call-- the young people call me a cougar. [CHUCKLES] So cougars don't get married. He's 88. I'm going on 94. [LAUGHS]
I mean, it depends on what you're willing to bring to the relationship. And he's been so great to me that I feel so [? fit-- ?] so grateful, really, so grateful. And it's pretty wonderful. Love at any age is terrific. Don't be afraid of it.
KARL PILLEMER: And let me stop there-- you know, happy to answer any questions. And the other thing is if you're interested, a lot of this-- OK, I will say one last thing, and I promise I'll stop.
This is part of this overall much longer-term and much more extensive project called the Cornell Legacy Project, where now I would guess we've conducted some kind of data collection about the life wisdom and practical advice of very old people, and sort of 2,200 or 2,300 people by now. So if there are other questions around these kinds of aging and advice issues more generally, I'm happy to answer them.
Sure.
AUDIENCE: You had said some of the people you talked to were divorced and some of them had had many marriages. Can you give a percentage of how many had long marriages and how many were divorced or widowed or in new relationships?
KARL PILLEMER: You know, I can, and I should have had some of those slides with me.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
KARL PILLEMER: I can't quite do-- yeah, absolutely. I can't quite do it off the top of my head. But it's a very good question.
In our national survey, we began that survey only interviewing people who were currently married. And that actually was a very-- so it's why we had actually not only long-married people, but people currently long-married, because we didn't want everything to be retrospective.
I would guess that around half of the interviewees were currently married. In some cases, they had been divorced and remarried. And probably a third-ish were widowed. And then the rest of-- I mean, it might have even been half and half-ish widowed and divorced. I can find out exactly.
But as I said, we really wanted some people who were widowed because we also asked them how they adjusted and if they had advice for younger people. And for folks who were divorced, a big question that we asked them was is there something you would advise to young people who are thinking of splitting up, anything you could have done that they didn't do?
Again, these were all the questions. It wasn't looking at correlations between certain characteristics and how long people were married. It was really, what do you think someone ought to do? And so I wanted, actually, widowed and divorced people for that.
AUDIENCE: And did you make-- compare at all by marital status? And I would find those conclusions where?
KARL PILLEMER: That's another good question, and it lets me sort of talk about the nature of the study. So even though the data were collected in these formal ways, I went back to an earlier phase of my training. And the way this is done is really qualitatively and narratively.
So we did broad coding of categories. But a lot of it is me as the social scientist reading these again and again and coming up with sort of these broad categories. So a lot of those kinds of comparisons I would typically do, we really haven't done.
I can do them in this study. And I shouldn't say that we haven't done them. But I will say that one of the overall observations from, say, looking at racial differences or looking at regional differences is that the lessons, the actual top lessons, are almost identical. There's very little variation between, say, the same-sex couples and heterosexual couples, or Black elders and white elders. What's really different is how people got there.
So gay male couples very often said, you know, you have to be resilient. You know, you have to get through these difficult times. And often their reference points, say, for example, was the AIDS crisis, when lots of their friends died.
And African Americans would come to a similar point, but it often was a result of discrimination they may have experienced. So even though life experiences were different, what's remarkably similar are these core of lessons. That's why I felt sort of confident about offering them. Great question. Sure.
AUDIENCE: I wonder, among the people who are widowed or divorced, was there-- and who did not remarry-- was there a reason they gave for deciding not to remarry?
KARL PILLEMER: That's also a good question. I would say there are three different factors. There was a core of people who had been divorced who really didn't want to do it again, for whom either they decided that they were the kind of person who shouldn't be married-- and that's a lesson, by the way, that didn't make it into the book, because, of course, this book didn't-- the one thing which the book doesn't have in the project is anybody who has voluntarily never been married.
So essentially, everybody had some experience of marriage. But there were people who really decided on an individual level that this was not for them. And despite their worldview that marriage is a good thing, a surprising number said it's not necessarily for everybody.
It's kind of a discipline. It can be tough. It can be hard. If you're not the right kind of person for it, maybe you shouldn't do it.
And so that was one thing. A second difficulty is really older women in particular have trouble finding partners. And may I digress just for one thing to say?
I mean, one of the things I learned in this book and this study is that many older people are very sexually active, or at least have a lot of sexual interest. And their problem is mostly not having a partner available. For the married older people or older people who were in partnerships, they described their intimate lives as fulfilling, and sometimes even more fulfilling than in earlier years when they were so busy with everything else.
The quote I love is the 75-year-old who said, for us, it's not procreation, it's recreation. Somebody else said, it's a tasty side dish. It's not the main meal anymore. But it was very important to them.
But, really, the problem for a lot of people in terms of not getting remarried, especially for women, is the men aren't there demographically. And that's compounded by the fact that men tend to marry women who are younger than they are.
But, yeah, you know, but I would say the most striking thing was there were a lot of people who'd had a very bad first marriage and a very good second one. And that's where I think a lot of the interesting insights come from.
AUDIENCE: Ah, where would we find these insights?
KARL PILLEMER: Well, that's a lot in there.
AUDIENCE: OK.
KARL PILLEMER: In the book, we-- there are a lot of examples throughout the book of people. And the chapter on communication was a big one, where a lot of people felt that their first marriage dissolved because they were just simply unable to talk to one another. And in the intervening years, they learned how to do it.
I actually give the example of one couple who got divorced and then remarried a half-century later and are having a wonderful time. And they argued it was because they learned how to talk to one another.
AUDIENCE: Was there a difference between how people relate to their marriage looking back as to how they felt about the way their children had turned out, and now their children are older, maybe they're presidents of universities, maybe they're incarcerated. Do they view their marriages differently based on how their children came out?
KARL PILLEMER: That is a really interesting topic, and it kind of actually blends some of the work I did for the first book and this one. You know, I don't think how children turned out is incredibly important to older people.
And this is actually from other research I do. A lot of the other research I do is on parent-child relations, as Francine knows, and-- is on parent-child relations in later life and on parents having favorites or unfavorites. And there's no question that if you feel like you're your children or a child haven't turned out well, it's a source of depression. It's a source of an uncertainty and a lack of completion in your life.
I didn't see that permeate so much into the marriages as much as how having a difficult or troubled adult child persists as a source of stress. And that, I think, to the extent that there are difficulties and conflicts in otherwise harmonious late-life marriages, it still is, unbelievably as it might be when the kids were little, arguments over children and different responsibilities for children, whether a child should come back and live in the house.
So children permeate some of the discussion, even in adulthood. But it didn't-- it doesn't rank so much around their achievements as it does, you know, children persisting as a source of stress. You know, this phrase-- we've done some research, and colleagues of ours have, too, that really shows the truth of the expression that you're only unhappy-- that you're only as happy as your unhappiest child. And that really does persist into later life.
So I think it can be very stressful for marriages. It's also true that negative things in general affect us more than positive things. So if you have one kid who's a college president and one who's living on a heating grate, it doesn't average out to one OK kid. You focus on the difficult one.
But, yeah, I wish, actually, in this study, it would have been very interesting to ask them more about the role of adult children in the later part of marriages. But we kind of ran out of room.
AUDIENCE: I just think it's this project you undertook together, and you could be-- different feelings about the results and each other's contribution to the results.
KARL PILLEMER: You know, that is so true. I mean, you're actually giving me a really good idea for a new study because that maps excellently on to the way that we know that people as individuals feel about their kids. We did a paper called "Pride and Joy," which is-- really, the sense of being proud of your kid is really critical.
However, how it affects the couple is an interesting one. What I would say the highest difficulty is with folks who remarry kind of later on and they're blending adult children. There were many arguments, actually, about how much to support them or one kid being a freeloader or that sort of thing. But I like that idea. If I can steal it, I'll use it later on.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: There we go.
AUDIENCE: I'll read it up and steal it back.
KARL PILLEMER: Sounds good.
AUDIENCE: Did your third book use these same people or are you building?
KARL PILLEMER: You know, yes and no. The reason why-- I actually used a subset of people from this longer-term project in this book for one very important reason. That's that I wanted the voice of the World War II and Depression-era generation.
And as we talked about earlier, they're running out. So in 2004, 2005, 2006, there were lots more of them. So I had more people who could say, for example, our country has been at war for the last 10 years, and families are dealing with it. How did you deal with it in Korea or World War II in particular? It was mostly wives who held families together. You know, how did you do it?
So, yeah, but on the whole, I pretty much rely on new interviews. So for the next book, which I want to have be about work and career and sort of living a meaningful life, the idea is to really focus, like you're talking about, on people 85 and older, to really try to get the sort of last message of the World War II generation. I can't believe our society is not making more about the fact that this generation is going to be gone.
AUDIENCE: Well, there's an awful lot about the Great Generation just in the last-- within the last 10 years.
KARL PILLEMER: Yeah, but not so much-- you know, I'm just feeling like there was a little D-day and that kind of thing. But we're really talking about this being over, you know? So--
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I feel like there's been an effort to reach out to war vets of that age, but maybe not necessarily just the general population.
KARL PILLEMER: Yeah. Well, the one thing in all of these venues that I do like to add that I think is really important is our society is in the midst right now-- and it's really why I've been writing these books, the underlying moral agenda-- our society is in the midst of a really dangerous experiment. And that dangerous experiment is the first society in history, the first time period, where younger people have no meaningful contact with older people in their daily routine of life, except for intermittent contacts with their own family members.
So this is really the first time that in neighborhoods, in towns, in large extended families, that young people are virtually divorced from the experience of older people and from their advice. And we live in the most age-segregated society. Also, research shows that you're more likely to have a close personal friend of a different race than you are to have a close personal friend who is 10 years older or 10 years younger than you are.
And there was another recent study of people 65 and older that showed that they had had-- the percent of people 65 and older who had had a meaningful personal conversation with someone under 30 was 20% in the last month. And if you exclude family members, it was 5%.
So we are increasingly detached from older people. And I just think it's a huge mistake. I don't know quite how to put the genie back in the bottle. And that's really the underlying reason is to try to see if we can convince younger people that there's valuable experience here for them.
AUDIENCE: Well, I kind of wonder about the reverse, too, because I thought it was interesting you mentioned in the beginning how although these lessons still apply, life is a lot different for young people. They're meeting on match.com or social media.
There's intimacy before marriage. Divorce is more socially acceptable. Did the people you interview have some kind of sense of how life was different for young people, and what did they think about it? Do they just kind of shake their head at young people now or--
KARL PILLEMER: That's a great question. They are immensely sympathetic. They really think that it must be extraordinarily difficult for young people.
A lot of them met people in small towns or in neighborhoods. They feel like it must be extraordinarily hard for young people in terms of mate selection. And by the way, the young people I interviewed, say, in New York City, they kind of agree.
I mean, a lot of the single young people I know, it's not like a Sex in the City wonderful time. People are very concerned about this. And they have to watch their friends are disproportionately emphasizing wonderful lives on Facebook.
So I think one thing they would say is sort of really how hard it must be for young people. But there is an acknowledgment. They are not old fuddy-duddies. This is not the "you kids get off my lawn" thing.
Many of them felt that things have changed positively in some ways. A lot of women, of the older women, are extraordinarily envious of younger women for their greater chances, ability to work and more egalitarian relationships. That would be an example.
Or a lot of them did find that the rigid taboos around sex and other things as they were growing up was difficult. One interesting thing is many people talked about, especially women, what it was like to have the first intimate experience of your life be after marriage and to realize that you were going to be married to this person your whole life.
For some of them, they described it as very positive. It was this year or two of getting to know one another. But I would say the majority of elders feel that it would have been better for them to have those experiences before marriage.
A number of them said-- and this was people of different political stripes-- that living together before marriage is a good idea. So they weren't rejecting of modern life. But they do see things as being tough for young people in the world of love and romance.
AUDIENCE: Maybe that's just me buying into the stereotypes because I would have just thought the elders just kind of shake their head and say, oh, the young generation, they're so messed up. They don't know how to do things. But it's interesting that they really do recognize the challenges because things are different, but also some of the advantages that the younger generation has that they didn't.
KARL PILLEMER: Yeah, no, no. I would say that they seem really pretty open-minded. There were things that they were the most adamant about that I wouldn't have expected. And I put this in the book, and I preface it, half-jokingly, as what I think is the most controversial thing in the book.
They really believe, even though many of them are now on the internet, that people should disconnect when they're at home, that your home should be this kind of haven in a heartless world where you really go and you erect a force field, and the rest of the world can't get in. And many of the men-- and some of these folks were high-powered executives, kind of workaholics-- viewed the inability of someone to reach them in their off time as so critical to their family life.
And one guy said, oh, these poor people. I mean, it just strikes-- really, that strikes them as something unfortunate. And I do think that's a life lesson. I've taken that to heart myself. I really do try to keep the phone put away more because these are people who had wonderful successful careers and lived without it, you know? So I think it was that kind of thing.
Other--
AUDIENCE: Did you have anybody from an arranged marriage, or what we used to call a shotgun marriage? And were their lessons enlightening?
KARL PILLEMER: I did. I did. In fact, I mentioned one of them in the book. Actually, she would be a very good interviewee for your project someday.
I'll give an example and then talk more generally. Yeah, the answer is yes. And interestingly, where it came up the most was in the Chinese community, which we don't think of as formal arranged marriages.
But one woman was a very typical example. She said, you know, I was living with my parents, working in their restaurant or store. My two aunties knew that there was a guy who was about to go back to Hong Kong to try to find a wife for him. And so they introduced us.
She and many of the other ones-- now, it might be reconstructive memory. Also, folks from Indian families-- were generally positive about it. And what everybody said was that I could say no but that the relatives did a lot of the vetting. They did the sense of are we similar, are we going to get along, and then we could say yes or no. But a lot of the difficult groundwork was taken out of the way.
And now, it could be a selection bias because these were all marriages that lasted long. But the folks who were in those marriages were generally positive about the process, you know, especially if it wasn't oppressive. But, yeah, I would say-- I mean, it wasn't a whole lot of people. Maybe between 10 and 15 of the folks had something that at least looked like an arranged marriage where relatives had done the initial selection. And they were-- they were kind of positive about it.
AUDIENCE: How about marriages forced by a pregnancy?
KARL PILLEMER: You know, this was unusual in their age bracket. There definitely were cases of it. In almost every case that I can remember, it didn't work out well for them, or it was very difficult.
But you also raise another interesting point that I wanted to touch on. Pregnancy prior to marriage is in general not-- I mean, this may sound obvious, but isn't a good predictor of a long and stable marriage. And one of the things that researchers have found in general-- we have this idea that half of marriages end in divorce. So we all hear that again and again and again.
And it's actually not true. First of all, the divorce rates are going down. But for subgroups of the population, your chances are really good. And a subgroup of the population where it's really bad is people who bear a kid before getting married.
Where your chances of staying together are really good, like 80%, are if you've got a college education and you get married in your late 20s, and you aren't doing it because you're pregnant, you've got about an 80% chance of at least making it for 20 years or more. So all those kinds of things, both with the elders and here, not having to get married, but following a pattern that has you more kind of independent and knowing yourself, et cetera-- each thing leads to something else.
I will say this a very strong recommendation, which seems so obvious I didn't actually highlight it in the book, but it certainly is different. I would say the majority of folks said, wait to get married. Don't get married too soon.
And many of them said it in this way. You know, I got married at 21. I wish I'd waited until later. I was too young.
So this sense of choosing someone carefully and delaying marriage-- maybe I should put that in the book. Well, it'll have to go in a later one.
AUDIENCE: Did that have to do with specifically waiting to consider marriage for later or longer courtships with the same person? We date for so long now.
KARL PILLEMER: It's true. You know, both, I think. There were people who met and got married within a few months because the husband was going off to World War II, which, by the way, you then didn't see the person for two years, and all you could communicate through was via letter. So that's pretty remarkable.
I think that people in general felt that they didn't know themselves well enough. And so one of these areas where they're envious about younger people is being out, experiencing the world. They definitely don't want someone to have a short courtship.
They really say again and again-- and that was actually in the first book. They say really choose carefully. Wait. Make sure you're absolutely certain. And that was based on people who did it and people who didn't, who said that my marriage was way too rocky because I did it too quickly.
So even though the age of marriage is going up, I would say the vast majority of these folks think that's probably a good thing. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. And that's something I did touch on in the first book.
They say despite their own experience, choose really, really carefully. Think twice. Think three times. Think four times. And wait if you're at all uncertain.
So, yeah, I think they like that idea. He said channeling the elders? I say, I mean, I don't know that much about marriage. I just know all these people who do, you know? It's like--
AUDIENCE: So you didn't get a sense that they got married young and they grew together? They said more--
KARL PILLEMER: You are tempting me to contradict myself.
AUDIENCE: I'm just quoting my own bubbe.
KARL PILLEMER: Well, that is one thing-- that's one difference between their time and our time. And at the risk of sounding contradictory, that is a point they make, namely-- and this was true even for me in the '70s.
People had much more of a sense that you would get married and then you would engage in your life together. So the process of schooling and building a career and those kinds of things, you actually did with someone else.
Every survey done now of 20-somethings and early 30-somethings shows there's almost universal agreement that you want things settled. You want your career settled, your education done. Maybe you want a house before you get married.
They do think that younger people are missing out on having a partner in those important, emerging adulthood transitional moments. And I do mention in there that the idea that you wait until everything is fixed and firm and ready is something, even if it sounds a bit contradictory to the wait-and-see, they think that younger people are missing something there.
That was really valuable for them to engage in the struggle together. That's a good question. I hadn't thought of it.
AUDIENCE: Did you speak to any of the older people who were cohabiting rather than married?
KARL PILLEMER: And that is mostly happening now, as you probably know. Women in their 60s and beyond who get involved with somebody, especially in a case where a woman is widowed and experienced being a caregiver, really don't want to be a caregiver again. And it's one reason why some of them choose not to get married.
And that's both anecdotally and in some surveys, that the idea of being married and being legally responsible in a caregiving situation is something that does make people hesitate. And many of the elders who got married did so-- in this study, did so in a savvy way. They really carefully articulated, for example, how they would keep their money separate, the inheritance to both families.
A number of them did prenuptial agreements that specifically laid that out. People are cautious about remarriage at every point in the life cycle. And men are more eager to get married right away, and they remarry very quickly.
And there was some of that here. But I would say for both genders, there was a sense of caution about legal remarriage. And now that people don't have to do it unless they feel ethically obligated to, it's an open option.
But, yeah, I would say that there's-- if not even just openness to cohabitation, but a number of people are doing the-- it's got an acronym-- the--
AUDIENCE: LAT?
KARL PILLEMER: Exactly.
AUDIENCE: Living Apart Together.
KARL PILLEMER: Living Apart Together was-- for some folks, actually, that was more common than I'd expected, you know? But then you do-- I mean, children are sometimes oppositional and worried and that sort of thing.
Karl Pillemer, Cornell professor of human development, meets with
journalists in NYC to discuss his Marriage Advice Project and new book '30
Lessons for Loving.'
