Review: September Songs; The Good News About Marriage in the Later Years

When marriage is discussed on this site, it is almost exclusively about what has gone wrong. When you think of all of the stressors that can happen in middle age, it hard to imagine that any relationship could weather such an assault. But a surprisingly number do, but you don't hear so about them --and rarely does someone write about them. But finally someone has. Author Maggie Scarf delves into the lives of couples in long-term marriages in "September Song: The Good News About Marriage in the Later Years." Despite what others have said about the loneliness of the "empty nest" years, Scarf finds that couples who have been married many years "rediscover and reconnect" with their spouses in a way that wasn't possible during period of career building and child raising. The book balances in-depth interviews with seven couples along with empirical evidence supporting the anecdotal stories.

"September Song" also covers the how the institution of marriage has evolved over the past 50 years--particularly the blurring of the traditional roles of the husband and wife in the relationship in terms of career and child rearing. Prior to the 1960s, when a couple said "I do", it was pretty clear what the husband was expected to do and how the wife would be spending her next 30 years. But after decades of social change, not to mention cohabitation, out-of-wedlock births, single parent child-rearing, and a sky-rocketing divorce rate, marriage and what it meant to those in it has changed greatly.

But change doesn't have to mean destruction, and Scarf set out to find out how the couples in long-term marriages made it happen.

Here's what one Amazon reviewer had to say about the topic:

Here's the blueprint for a happy, lifelong union. It's called "staying together no matter what" --- and these couples, married 40 or 50 years or longer, tell you exactly how they did it.

Scarf also points out what happens to those who opt to end the marriage in divorce by citing a landmark study (The National Survey of Families and Households) that looked at the aftermath of divorce of over five thousand married adults and found that, on average, unhappily married adults who divorced or separated were no happier than unhappily married adults who stayed married to the same partner.

But let's get back to the positive. Good long marriages are possible and Scarf and her respondents are happy to tell you how they did it.

Amazon Review: September Songs: The Good News About Marriage in the Later Years