Writing by Dr. Dannielle Blumenthal

Note: This post is about marriage, but it isn’t a tacit signal of support for abuse of any kind. If you or someone you know are being abused, please seek professional guidance.
So, we’re on this retreat, the two of us, and we’re at the table. It’s like, you know, you get your food and all. There’s this couple who clearly have been married a long time.
And my husband says to the husband, “So, you know, how long have you been married?” And the husband says, “Oh, you know, like 50 years.” So my husband goes, “How many of those years were the good years?” And the guy is laughing, and I’m laughing because I’ve heard this joke a million times. It never gets old.
Why does it never get old? Because the thing that they don’t tell you about marriage is that you’re going to deal with a lot of ups and a lot of downs. Now, I distinctly remember—I think it was either my grandmother or one of my aunts, or someone—saying that in the olden days, they didn’t have a thing called divorce.
Because when a couple would get married and one of them would come back to their parents screaming about how miserable they were, the parents would send them back home and say, “Go work it out with your spouse.” That was then. Nowadays, there is this weird expectation—and I find it to be very weird and untenable—that every minute of your waking married life is going to be like an Instagram Reel, where you are just so in love, you are so happy, everything is so perfect, and you are always on the same page.
My God, that’s ridiculous. I mean, if you’re a young person, you must know intellectually that that is ridiculous. If you are an older person, you know for sure that it is ridiculous.
So, I thought it was so great to see an older couple that had been together for many, many years, and clearly, you know, he was talking and she was looking at him and just like, “Whatever, whatever.”
I remember my father-in-law—and I’ll end it here—when my mother-in-law got sick at the end and she couldn’t walk, how he literally cared for her and moved her around, even though he himself was barely capable. He did anything and everything for her.