On September 4, 2008, my book September Songs: The Good News About Marriage in the Later Years - will be published by Riverhead/Penguin Press. This book was inspired by the fact that my first book on marriage - Intimate Partners - ended with a couple in their late 40s, and I got a lot of flak about that. People wrote to me, and said, "Hey, what about us? Marriage doesn't end in the 40s! How about partners who are in their fifties, sixties, and older?"
September Songs is meant to redress this failing. I must say that working on this book came as a surprise to me! For one thing, I found that older couples were more contented and had more of a sense of well-being than did partners in earlier phases of the marital cycle. The biggest surprise, though, came from the realization that many of the couples I was talking to wouldn't even have been alive if they'd been born at the beginning of the last century. In 1900, average life expectancy was under 50 years. In 2008, it's 77.6; in other words, couples are now living together, post child rearing, some 2 to 3 decades.
What is life like for these mates in their later adult years? What do they believe was the smartest thing and the dumbest thing they ever did in their lives? What are the sexual issues that older couples face? How have their arguments changed over time? What is life like for long-married pairs when the years that have gone by are far greater in number than the years that they have left to live? This is (part of) what September Songs is about.
