Composing a Further Life

new. Sometimes there are strong legal arguments for the decision, as estate planning becomes an issue, but what begins as a practicality often becomes an emotional turning point, and the word
forever
still retains its ancient force, both terrifying and reassuring, in the face of the need to make a new commitment or reaffirm an old one. After all, most of us have lived lives based on commitments made without any way of knowing where they would lead. The uncertainty is an essential element in commitment, the acceptance of consequences an essential element in fidelity.
    This issue first struck me a decade ago, when I heard of a decisive refusal of marriage. Friends of ours who had been together for forty years or more and raised a large family split up after a period of increasing unhappiness, and the wife moved abroad for several years. I suspect that she belonged to that generation of women who had never lived on their own, going from college directly into marriage. In any case, it was for her an important liberation to leave the spacious house she had grown up in, in which she and her husband had raised their children. She filed for divorce. Some years later, after she had developed cancer and a first surgery had been followed by a recurrence that was clearly going to be fatal, she moved back again, staking out space for a small apartment in rooms abandoned by grown-up children. As her health declined and she continued living under the same roof with her ex-husband, friends and family urged a remarriage, if only to reduce inheritance taxes, but she steadfastly refused. Having escaped from an unhappy relationship, she was unwilling to reaffirm it on paper for reasons of convenience. Rejecting a failed marriage, she still clung to a concept of marriage she was unwilling to cheapen.
    More recently, I know a couple who, although clearly in love, seemed committed to an intermittent relationship, living between different countries, who got married ostensibly to solve a visa problem—then set out to build a totally new life together, as if the legal formality had itself given birth to a new and deeper emotional commitment.
    Dan and Michael celebrated their marriage for a second time in the spring after I visited them, during the brief period when same-sex marriage was legal in California. Much of the debate about legalizing same-sex marriage has concerned legalities and entitlements, but in many cases the real issue is the desire to affirm abiding love and to confirm the acceptance of responsibility and the willingness to commit to the well-being of another. Even at the legal level, the most wrenching effect of denying the right to marriage to same-sex couples is when a long-term partner is refused the duty and the privilege of being at the side of a dying lover because he or she is not “next of kin.”
    Within the last month, two long-term couples of our acquaintance have married. Few if any of their friends would think of them nowadays as having been “living in sin”—a huge change in mores in the course of my lifetime. Both couples are past the age when having children is a possibility. In one case illness is a factor. But what strikes me is that in these cases, although the commitment has been clear for a long time and the actual marriage is a reaffirmation of love, not so different from married couples who reaffirm their vows on a fiftieth anniversary, the decision to formalize the marriage acknowledges new circumstances that require the commitment to take a new form. As in the marriages of couples in their twenties, the vows of couples over sixty are made in the awareness of an uncertain future.
    Human ideas about marriage vary greatly, but marriage in some form or other is a human universal, connected with varying ideas about paternity. We are just beginning to realize the impact that changes in life expectancy will have on the institution of marriage. Visit a colonial-era graveyard, looking at the intervals between birth and death, and then notice how sometimes a man would outlive several wives, often dead in childbirth, each tombstone marked as “beloved wife of ———”, and then be outlived by the last, whose stone reads “relict of ———”. Even with an exploding number of divorces, the average duration of a marriage in America at the end of the twentieth century was longer than in the colonial period. 14 Marriage did not evolve with life expectancies at birth of over seventy years, so