Boomer Marriages Versus GenX and Millennial Marriages

Notes on the UT to FL Culture Shock

It’s been a real culture shock moving to Florida. Moving from the youngest state in the country, to the oldest.

All of our friends in Utah were in their 30’s to 50’s, and most of our friends in Florida are in their 60’s and 70’s.

It’s been interesting to see how different dynamics in marriages are, based on age. Living in a beach community, we all know each other, because we’re outside often and the ocean and its shore bring us together.

We know a lot about each other, and it’s not uncommon to just drop in on another couple, out sitting on their porch, or knocking on their door. Or text them to come out to the beach to play.

If you’re walking to the beach or riding in a golf cart, the unwritten rule is that you wave to every neighbor you pass, including the ones you don’t know. Sometimes you stop to chat.

I love it.

In Utah, some of our friends were single, some married. And the complaints of our 30-something to 50-something friends were often related to their partners’ being tired and not giving their husbands the love and intimacy husbands want and used to enjoy, due to kids (and often paid work) taking up big chunks of women’s bandwidth for intimacy and “giving.”

This is a very common issue in the child-rearing years. Two-thirds of women report being markedly less satisfied with their marriages, in the year following having a baby, and many men also report lower marital satisfaction.

We’ve had 2.5 years of adjustment to Florida, where our friends are mostly decades older. These couples often have equally gridlocked marriages, but over different issues.

Many have just learned to live with their partners’ quirks and weaknesses, too, in their 60’s and 70’s. The vast majority of our friends in that age bracket are in a second, third, or even fourth marriage.

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One of my observations is that in your 30’s, kids and money keep you together despite some irreconcilable differences–and in your 60’s and beyond, health problems, life experience, and not wanting to wade into the dating pool again keep you together.

Life has a way of bumping off our rough edges, making many of us less dogmatic, more flexible, and easier to get along with, as we get older.

We often become more likely to tolerate and even laugh off or embrace our partner’s quirks and failings. (People in their 20’s like to call this “settling.”)

Three of my good friends in the last three months were seriously considering divorce, but have decided to stay, and work on the relationship. 2023 is one heckuva rough time to be single.

Perhaps seniors get to a point where we’d rather have someone to help, if we fall and break our hip in the shower, than try to find someone “better?” People in their 30’s certainly don’t think like that. In your 70’s, you might.

But a common issue in senior marriages is that one partner has tended to their health, and remained active, and one hasn’t. And of course “luck,” or “genetics” often have a lot to do with it.

Two of my neighbors have a disabled wife I’ve never met, as she can’t come outside–and I’ve never heard either of them say a word of criticism about their wives.

Women may be surprised to learn that husbands criticize their wives to others a tiny fraction of the times women criticize their husbands to others.

We have a friend who is in poor health due to drinking a case of beer a day, for decades, and always has a wad of “chew” in his mouth. His wife is not pleased.

We have another (younger than me, which is rare around here) who is in extremely poor health from a diet devoid of vegetables, fruits and greens his whole lifetime; he considers himself allergic to them. His wife is not pleased either.

We have a third friend, though, who injured his back playing golf, and has had two back surgeries in the last year. His wife: also displeased.

To plead for mercy for the partner in a marriage with worse health problems: one thing to consider is that the healthier partner hasn’t made 100% good choices, either. The beam and the mote come to mind, from the Bible. Maybe in part, these ladies are just luckier? Or the lot God gave to them was to be a caretaker? (Again.)

Health issues are the #1 topic of conversation in the 60+ crowd. Often, the health issues of the partner.

We have three couple friends whom the wife is a go-go-go personality, and has kept herself fit, and the husband–not so much, struggling with some ghastly health problems.

Out to dinner with one of them recently, the wife was cataloging her husband’s health problems and blaming his poor lifestyle choices for them.

While the two husbands were in a side conversation, the wife, complaining to me, said, “Watch this!”

She stabbed a forkful of her salad, and said, “Michael, try this.” He made a grimace, leaned his head back, and refused. “See?” she said to me.

These four books (I recommended two of them in a previous piece on marriage, but I’m adding two more) I cannot recommend highly enough, for any married couple–even if the marriage is strong and stable:

1. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work–by John Gottman PhD
2. You Just Don’t Understand–by Deborah Tannen
3. Hold Me Tight–by Sue Johnson, PhD
4. Crucial Conversations–by McMillan PhD et al

Reading those books together, and discussing them, with openness, is worth 30 private therapy sessions, and Audible makes it cheap and easy.

You can buy all four books for $50, about a third of what you could buy one session in therapy for.

Plus, good luck even finding an experienced, wise therapist these days. The economy may be suffering, and 2023 is going to go down as a recession for the professional class–but I can assure you that the good therapists aren’t lacking work.

Practices are closed, or have 6-month or 12-month waitlists, for the best practitioners. You can get a therapist from Better Health, or a 28-yo therapist–but guess what, having been one myself, I can tell you, those aren’t the therapists most couples are looking for!

I’d go further, even. Reading those books twice, both of you, and discussing them–gives you the tools, education, and knowledge that a master’s degree in one of the disciplines that produce today’s therapists would give you.

(Sifting out all the useless stuff I also learned in three years in grad school. There was some good stuff, and some pointless stuff. I’d literally rate reading those four books, twice, as equal to a masters degree, if you don’t need the masters degree for licensing and work.)

Of course, those therapists also have clinical experience. But my point is, those four books are a master class in how to be happy and fair–and loved!--in a relationship. The DIY way, without a mediator or expensive guru.

Audible makes it easy to learn about relationships and communication, as you can listen at 1.5x speed while you’re cooking, cleaning, eating, or going for a walk. I can “read” a book in two days, “multi-tasking” while doing other physical tasks. And I work far more than fulltime, so I bet you can, too!

We all have to eat, right? What are you doing while you eat? Could you be learning great tactics to strengthen your marriage? (I’m talking to those of you who say, “I’m too busy.”) You drive, right?

I take notes, in “Notes” on my phone, to discuss with my husband, or share with you here.

Divorce is one of the most awful experiences you go through in life. My current marriage is very strong, not perfect, but happy and stable and strong–and I failed at one, after 20 years.

More accurately, I bailed on it. Had I known then what I know now–I’d have just stayed. And worked it out, even if I’m much, much happier now.

Because part of the problem was ME. The blame is actually almost never one-sided. If “blame” must be parsed.

Because of what my children went through as a result of my choice, if I had it to do again, I’d stay married. It’s taken me many years, to have the humility to say that.

And those of you who message me saying, “But my divorce was warranted!” (and some will)--I believe you, and have no judgment of you. Not all marriages should be for life, just like one party sometimes breaks business contracts.

I had four different people tell me, when I was getting divorced, two of them happily remarried, “If I had it to do again, I’d have stayed married to the first one.” In an effort to say, “Please reconsider. For the sake of your children.”

Doing therapy with a couple is an interesting dynamic, with most wives talkative and engaged, and most husbands slouched in their chairs and making eye contact with no one.

Especially when the therapist is a woman, since relationships with women are so very different than the male-female and male-male relationship dynamics. (A large majority of therapists are women. And two women immediately go to work establishing rapport. A man can be confused and feel left out.)

From the time we are 5-year old little girls, we must be collaborative, validate each other, listen, and empathize. You’re a castaway in female culture, if you can’t do these things. When 5-year old boys play together, they tend to compete, one-up each other, and argue.

All entirely normal. Then–a worldwide phenomenon, and no one really knows why–girls stick together, and boys stick together–for 10 years!

Before hormones and intrigue about the other gender brings us back together. Then, we’re thinking about close partnerships with the opposite gender, when we just spent 10 years in radically different gender cultures, NOT practicing collaboration with the other!

A recipe for challenge. (I have some questions for God, when I get to the “other side!” This being one of them.)

And of course there are same-sex relationships who don’t exactly fit that mold based on biology and/or social conditioning and life experience.

I remember one of my first close lesbian friends in grad school telling me, “Don’t romanticize lesbian relationships. The level of codependence is really high.”

Some lesbians, the literature shows, aren’t really so much sexually attracted to women, as much as avoidant of men after bad experiences with one, or a few, but preferring a partnership lifestyle versus a single one.

Relationships just aren’t easy, in general, but usually they’re worth the work in resolving differences, is the point.

Gottman says that men who refuse to accept “influence” from their wives end up angry, and die alone. Alone in a marriage, or “alone-alone.”

So the therapist must navigate this frequent issue of husbands withdrawing in a counseling session, and wives being chatty cathies–he or she must draw the husband in, rather than defaulting into the ways women establish rapport with each other, generally a very high priority for women.

Any good therapist will ask the husband to turn his chair, and look his wife in the eye, and address her. This is when things “get real,” and progress can be made.

The “soft start” Gottman refers to often is incredibly useful, in marriage. Do you start a difficult conversation giving authentic credit and praise for your partner’s efforts and character, and using “I” language rather than “you” language? As you begin addressing something that is bothering you?

The first time I went to marriage therapy, in my early 20’s, the PhD student therapist confessed to me privately that the clinical relationship with me and my husband was seriously challenging her.

As therapists have to identify and work around their “projecting” issues–and she related to everything I said about my marriage, as being very similar to her own.

Therapists are trained to recognize when their client reminds them of their own mother or an ex-boyfriend, AKA “projection.”

So that they can be intentional in separating their own assumptions and reactions from their desire to help. (It’s pretty unusual, though, for a therapist to tell her client that she’s struggling to help the couple because she hears her client describing her own marital issues!)

Women are naturally talkative about relationship issues, and quickly seek to establish a bond with the therapist. While the men often sit in silence, or saying very little, with their body language looking rather “disengaged.”

The Boomer generation saw a radical shift, as women went off to work for the first time–and at the same time, cultural changes demanded that men be emotionally responsive and “available,” while no one was teaching them how.

I have a lot of sympathy for Boomer men. That was and still is a rough transition.

And even as 60% then–now more like 90%--of women work for pay, women continued to carry the lion’s share of household chores. Because a larger number of men are perfectly happy to live a messier “bachelor” lifestyle, and a larger number of women prefer “clean and tidy.” Perhaps many men had old-school mothers who cleaned up after them.

Gottman tells a story of a newlywed young man walking past the bathroom where his wife was scrubbing, and stopped and said, “Are we moving??”

Both men and women can benefit from therapy, when the clinician is experienced and knows how to draw the man into the conversation and help the couple shift their dynamics.

But whether your marriage has the common issues of the 30-somethings, where women tend to be drained from so much intimacy with their small children–or the dynamics of the 70-somethings where resentments are verbalized less often and the healthier partner may resent the unhealthier one–

–marriage is work, period. And those four books are a great “refresher course” even for those in stable, committed, happier marriages.

In my last article on marriage, one gentleman wrote me saying his daughter was getting married, and asked, “Would she benefit from her and her fiance reading these books?” That’s honestly the best idea I’d heard all week.

Recently I heard medical-freedom activist and actor Jenny McCarthy (mother of a vax-injured autistic son) say that when she first got serious with her now-husband, former “New Kids on the Block” singer Donny Wahlberg:

She immediately enrolled them in therapy. And commented on how useful it was, for instance, to learn “oh, this is how YOU fight–well, this is how I fight.” A common misperception of married people is that conflict is failure, and shameful.

Actually, the healthiest and happiest couples fight.  My one and only frustration in my current marriage was articulated as, in the early years, I said, “You don’t fight fair.” (A better way I could have said it: “I experience our arguments to not be very fair.”)

Interestingly, this has been largely resolved by his reading those books I’d read years ago, except Hold Me Tight, which came out in 2020, new for me this year but hits my “top four” list.

My husband wasn’t trying to “not fight fair”--he just didn’t know how to navigate conflict in a fair way, and has been totally open to doing so.

I was explaining what “fighting fair” is, and frustrated that I wasn’t getting through–but sometimes we hear things better, from a neutral third party expert, in a book.

Once I met a recently divorced woman (ironically, at a wedding) who told me that she got divorced because they never fought.

Interesting idea. If you’re not challenging each other on anything, maybe it’s because you’re both perfect and in that unicorn blissful marriage–but maybe it’s because neither of you much care?

We think of “passion” as a thing that takes place in a bedroom. But what if “passion” also shows up in conflict? Because we both actually care so much?

Things to think about. But reading those books, above, is good for happy marriages, struggling marriages, and new relationships alike.

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