The intensity of arguments change over time. In 1980, I wrote a book about marriage - Intimate Partners - in which the oldest couple interviewed was in their late forties. I got a lot of flak about that from older readers, who wrote to me and said, "Hey, what about us? We're still alive and kicking! Why exclude the marriages of older people?

I recognized the validity of that complaint, but for the next twenty years I never really returned to the subject of couples' relationships. When I finally decided to do so, and began talking with couples in their older adult years - including some of the pairs that I'd interviewed two decades earlier - I was in for some surprises! I was finding a lot of contentment and well-being in marriages that had been tense and stormy the first time around.

I was buffaloed. Much of my writing life has been devoted to identifying and solving problems - but the folks I was talking to were in an unexpectedly good place. It wasn't that they were without issues and differences - but they seemed to be on the same page when it came to resolving them.

Here's an example from my own long-married life. My husband and I were lunching with dear friends when the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict arose. The discussion became very heated very quickly when my husband raised his hand and said "I have a proposal. Let's stop this discussion now." The other couple laughed, and so did we, and we turned to other subjects, including political ones upon which we agree.