Happy Marriages: 30 Global Couples Tell Their Stories

By Gayle Kimball

30 couples from around the world reveal how they resolve disagreements and stay happy--11 countries are represented.
Experts teach their techniques for resolving conflicts.
You'll learn to create lasting satisfaction in your relationship, including sexuality.
Includes men's and women's perspectives.
We can learn from the personal experiences of these 30 couples how to enhance our own relationships, as well as learn from the conflict prevention methods explained by our experts.
Gayle Kimball, Ph.D. is the Nautilus award winner author of more than 20 books, including 50/50 Marriage and Everything You Need to Know to Succeed After College.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9780938795735

Book preview

Introduction

Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake — it is everything except what it is!

Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet

Happy Marriages is organized around the major challenges couples face, including children, former spouses, cultural differences, and poor health, and how they work through these conflicts. Marital satisfaction researchers report that bonding is based on shared memories of good times, while stressful situations can erode the bonding. Experts like Jed Diamond, Donna Eden, and Warren Farrell, whose techniques are included in this book, feel their first marriages could have been saved if they had learned the conflict resolution processes they developed later.

Only 17 of the 30 couples are both in their first marriage. The others feel they learned about what they really want in a spouse from their first marriage. Only two of the heterosexual couples decided not to have children and 11 of the couples with children have young ones still at home.

My 50/50 Marriage and 50/50 Parenting books were published in the 1980s. To find out how relationships stay happy over time, in 2020 and 2021 I interviewed two of the same couples I could locate, and others in different family types representing 11 countries, including two arranged marriages in India. I wanted to find out how couples create interest in each other over decades and to discover the tools that give a relationship more depth and joy, resolve conflicts, and promote intimacy and growth.

To find out how gender roles impact marriages, I included two trans couples and three same-sex couples, as well as couples in long-term first, second, or third marriages. I interviewed men’s issues activists to better understand how men feel disadvantaged in emotional exchanges and their suggestions to men.

I knew some of the couples from my travels and others were recommended by an interviewee or an internet newsletter request. The interviews were conducted on Skype. The videos are available on my YouTube channel, listed by the couple’s first names (except for four of them who I first interviewed on my KZFR radio show, whose link is listed in their chapter). My video interviews with insightful researchers and writers are listed in the Bibliography. My comments are in italics and the interviewees and I edited their chapters.

We can learn from the personal experiences of these 30 couples how to enhance our own relationships, as well as the conflict prevention methods explained by our experts. The case studies of problem-solving in action illustrate researchers’ findings. Please share your observations of what you find enhances your relationship on my website, which includes the generic interview questions for couples.¹

Part 1 The Research on Happy Marriages

Chapter 1 Insights from Researchers

A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave. Mahatma Gandhi

Marriage Overview

•The best estimate is that 45% of marriages in the US will end in divorce, along with about one-third of marriages in the UK and 38% of Canadian marriages. ²

•A large US survey of spouses in 2020 during the pandemic reported that 29% said their marriage was in trouble, down from 40% the previous year. ³

•Both divorce and marriage rates are down but divorce remains frequent.

•Millennials are more likely to delay marriage and Baby Boomers are more likely to get divorced than any other age group.

•In the US, the median marriage age is 28 for women and 30 for men.

•One-third of people ages 15 and over have never been married and 28% of all households are single-person households. ⁴

I interviewed hundreds of egalitarian married and divorced persons for 50/50 Marriage and 50/50 Parenting and then in 2020 and 2021 interviewed 30 more couples in various family types for this book. Egalitarian people aim to share family work and decisions equally and fairly. The bottom line is who has more leisure time. I read hundreds of studies of marital satisfaction to see what works and what causes divorce. Many advice books had a Christian approach, but I sought out sources based on lab research like that of psychologists John Gottman and Sue Johnson.

When my university students and I surveyed hundreds of people of various ages about what makes them happy, at the top of the list was being with the people they love. Other factors that lead to enjoyment were achieving a goal and engaging in fun activities such as sports or being in nature. Yet many of us get seduced into pouring our best energy into work. At the end of their lives, no one says they wished they’d spent more time working but many say they wished they’d taken more time to enjoy family and friends.

The egalitarian couples I interviewed emphasize that being best friends is the key to success as couples who believe in equal role-sharing. The hallmark of friendship is that the pair likes to talk with each other and spends time communicating, the main tool for successfully maintaining a marriage. Couples talk about their goals, experiences, thoughts, and feelings––which requires turning off screens. Questions for Couples Journal by Maggie Reyes provides questions that you might not think to ask, and Marriage Encounter offers them online.⁵ Mark Nepo’s The Book of Awakening offers daily thoughtful questions inspired by essays.

A 50/50 husband contentedly married for 18 years reports, Not being afraid to talk about things carries a vitality in itself. That's what a relationship is about and what keeps it meaningful. Communication is at the heart of it. Honest disclosure of feelings prevents resentment and manipulative behaviour and generates trust and respect—important ingredients of any relationship.

Fran and Juanita are an example of married good friends, who love riding their bikes and working in their garden, activities they’ve shared during their 55 years of marriage. They met when Fran noticed a fellow college student: I loved the sight of her and introduced myself. Juanita said, I liked him right away, felt comfortable and safe with him. I never looked back. (We see this theme of chemistry between two people in the recent interviews. See Helen Fisher’s Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love) Less than a year later they married, spurred on by a desire to work together as fire lookouts in the Idaho forest.

Like the other egalitarian couples, they are best friends who enjoy talking with each other. What’s to talk about after a half-century together? Shared interests in politics, gardening, cooking the food they grow, and discussing what they’re reading. They try to follow the Golden Rule and treat the other as they would like to be treated. We love and respect each other, Fran says. (The importance of respect is another common theme because it generates positive interactions.) He added, We used to have petty arguments, nothing serious, but annoying. One day, Juanita said, ‘Let’s forget about it.’ And that’s what we did.

Similar to other couples, having babies was the most stressful time for them because the focus moved to the kids, especially for the mother. Their relationship rekindled after the kids left home. (Their three offspring are in happy marriages as well, another theme.) Juanita and Fran each are full of zest for life and their marriage is enriched by this synergy.

A similar couple has been married for 50 years with three children, and also has a communication technique that works for them. They ask a point of information question in the spirit of genuine inquiry, not as a loaded question. For example, What would you like to eat for dinner? is an inquiry, while an unfair question is, Why are you wearing that shirt? Mike reports that asking out of curiosity, rather than judgment, relaxes the other person. They also laugh a lot and enjoy talking with each other, familiar themes of the importance of humor and finding each other interesting. Mike also likes that his wife confronts him when he’s being difficult.

Jeanette and Robert Lauer, authors of Till Death Do Us Part, define the four keys to a successful marriage as friendship, commitment, agreement on fundamentals, and humor. Friendship is enhanced by enjoyment, taking time to have fun together, and enjoying each other's jokes. Marriage researcher Howard Markman found, the amount of fun couples have and the strength of their friendships are a strong predictor of their future.⁶

According to sexologists William Masters and Virginia Johnson, pair bonding is based on the shared memories of good times, not on arguments over bills, child discipline, and housework. He left his first wife to marry Virginia after they had worked together for 15 years. It was her third marriage, which she said was dominated by their work and their original teacher/student dynamic.⁷ They were married for 21 years before they divorced after he reconnected with a woman he had met in medical school decades earlier. Their marriage might have survived if it was more equal.

The egalitarian couples suggest having realistic expectations of family life in the face of artificial social expectations that your partner be your sexy best friend and understanding therapist. This romantic view is only about 250 years old, as marriage historically was based on practical family considerations, not love, as is still true in arranged marriages. Finding a compatible partner based on romance is not easy, as evidenced by the poor track record of the Bachelor, Bachelorette, or Indian Matchmaking TV shows.

For long-term happiness, we need to identify the unconscious relationship patterns and expectations each person brings to the partnership and consciously decide what kind of partnership both want. (Also check out the free The Science of Well-Being online course taught by Laurie Santos at Yale.) Naming assumptions as you become aware of them prevents many misunderstandings, disappointments, and hurt feelings. Think about when you feel hurt: Is it because you had expectations and were disappointed? Your partner is not a mind reader. Explain what you want so your partner has the opportunity to comply, or explain why compliance is not possible, or suggest a compromise.

Carrying around unresolved resentment is harmful to the immune system as well as to the couple bond. (Books by Louise Hay correlate diseases with specific emotional issues.) For growth to develop we need a partner who is willing to explore the deeper subconscious influences on our interactions, like becoming aware that the biggest part of an iceberg under the surface directs its movement. Staying on the surface is like driving blindfolded.

A New Hampshire family law attorney observes in his divorce clients that, Most of the time, people don't put in the work. They let things go too far and their expectations are crazy. Work usually means talking about feelings and scheduling time for fun. Relationships are like a garden that needs to be watered, fed, and weeded by both partners. Couples often find that their marriage is put on the back burner in the face of more pressing demands from work and children. They are so tired after the children are in bed that they collapse on the couch and fall asleep rather than make love.

Arlie Hochschild's The Second Shift describes the rather joyless life in dual-earner families that comprised 45% of married couples in 2020.⁸ Fatigue puts a damper on ardour. People in the US are working about a month more each year than half a century ago. At the same time, parents are spending more time with their children than they did in the ‘60s, but extended families are often not available to help with childcare.⁹ In contrast, Felix Mbewe reported in our video interview from Zambia that when he got engaged, he and his wife were provided with permanent family mentors to advise and guide them.¹⁰ If they have a disagreement, they go to their mentors. When they have a baby, a family member will come and stay with them for months to help out. Community support is valued over individualism. In the West, too, happy couples have support and interests beyond themselves, according to Stephanie Coontz.¹¹

Studies warn that couples spend very little time actually talking to each other and when they do, it’s mostly about tasks. Cecile Andrews reported in The Circle of Simplicity that American couples only average 12 minutes a day in conversation.¹² Another study found that families only spend 12 hours a week in family activities.¹³ John Gottman cites a study of young professional couples that found the average amount of weekly time they talked to each other was only 35 minutes and much of that was about tasks!¹⁴

Now that most couples are employed, a man can’t expect that his employed wife will have the time and energy to cheerfully do most of the family work. The woman can’t expect the Prince to carry her off in his coach (shown at the beginning of the book) and support her forever after because he will not earn enough to pay for housing and the children's education by himself.

Father Knows Best is History

•The median marriage in the US lasted for 20 years in 2019 although divorce hit the lowest rate in 50 years—along with an all-time low rate of marriage. ¹⁵ Since over 40% of adults have never married, forecasts estimate that a quarter of young adults may never marry. ¹⁶

•In 2013, about a quarter of married people had been previously married.

•The average age of widowhood is around 59, indicating that most women need to plan on a lifetime in the workforce.

The media doesn’t provide much instruction. The wise father of ‘50s TV shows like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver, or The Cosby Show (starting in 1984), was replaced by a series of bumbling fathers like Archie Bunker in All in the Family, cartoon dad Homer Simpson, Al Bundy in Married with Children, and Family Guy’s Peter Griffin. Recently, more positive portrayals are Eric Taylor in Friday Night Lights, Danny Tanner in Full House, Joel Graham in Parenthood, and Jay Pritchett in Modern Family.¹⁷

Yet men are burdened with impossible expectations by the media portrayal of involved fathers shampooing their toddlers' hair while at the same time being expected to devote the long hours and competitive drive necessary to succeed at work. They’re still afraid that taking parental leave will jeopardize their career advancement and are still portrayed as tough guys.¹⁸

In a telling divide indicating the corrosive effect of stress, working-class and poor Americans are less likely to be in an intact marriage (only 24% in the lowest one-third income bracket) than couples in the top third income bracket (64% are in first marriages). Middle-aged adults are increasingly stressed and struggling with health problems, especially people with less education, which harms marriages.¹⁹

However, being wealthy is not enough, as evidenced by the divorce of Melinda and Bill Gates in 2021, after 27 years of marriage and three children (part of a trend of gray divorces of older couples). In her memoir, The Moment of Lift, Melinda related power struggles over who would write their Gates Foundation’s annual letter—I thought we were going to kill each other—and dissatisfaction with his long hours spent at work. Also, Bill made advances to other women, indicative of a mindset of entitlement that doesn’t serve an egalitarian partnership.²⁰

Melinda explained she focuses on funding women’s programs through her Pivotal Ventures because Even though most women now work full-time (or more), we still shoulder the majority of caregiving responsibilities; we face pervasive sexual harassment and discrimination; we are surrounded by biased and stereotypical representations that perpetuate harmful gender norms.

Many young women are not prepared for the glass ceiling that accelerates men's career progress above women's after their first five years on the job. Watching television and films creates an unrealistic view of life where problems are solved quickly. The media image of a superwoman creates dangerous expectations for women who think they should exercise to sculpt a trim body, wear elegant suits, carry a briefcase, come home and whip up a gourmet meal, and be a nurturing mother and sexy wife.

An ad copy asks a suited career woman holding her daughter's hand, Is your face paying the price of success? This ad reminds women that their most important avenue to success is being attractive to men. When Pew Research asked in 2017 what traits society most values, physical attractiveness was the top trait for women, while honesty was the top trait for men.²¹ Sneaky sexism is described in Jane Cunningham and Philippa Roberts’ 2021 book, Brandsplaining: Why Marketing is Still Sexist and How to Fix It, illustrating the endurance of stereotyped gender roles.

Part of the commitment to family is to be aware that work can be seductive and addictive. Do we work to live or live to work? Anne Wilson Schaef describes how workplaces function according to an addictive unhealthy system in When Society Becomes the Addict and The Addictive Organization, co-authored with Diane Fassel. One 50/50 wife comments, Your marriage will be only what you put into it. If you work at it, it will grow. If not, it will die, just as a car stops running if it’s not maintained. However, fairytales and romance novels end with, And they lived happily ever after. We are not given much education about how to succeed in marriage in a culture that defines success as having money and power rather than creating loving relationships. In fact, celebrities with long marriages are newsworthy.

Multiple studies report that people in committed relationships live longer and have better physical and mental health.²² This is especially true for married men in comparison to unmarried men, while women’s health is more harmed by an unhappy marriage than men in similar marriages.²³ A study found that people in happy relationships produced higher antibody levels after getting the flu vaccine and experienced faster wound healing. A loving relationship may reduce the stress response and thus reduce chronic inflammation that erodes health. However, studies show that marriage itself doesn’t bring happiness.

Marital satisfaction requires defining your own roles, rather than being limited by stereotypes. We are expected to concentrate on the couple bond during courtship. Then, after the honeymoon, he focuses on breadwinning and she focuses on tending to their family. Your love certainly deserves more time and energy than you spend earning and caring for possessions. Make a pie chart of how you spend your time and another showing how your values would allocate your time. A useful tool is to specifically state and write out your priorities as individuals and as a couple, decide how to be true to them, and revisit the list on anniversaries.

Marriage Stages

Paul McCartney, married three times, reports, It’s always a splendid puzzle. Even though I write love songs, I don’t think I know what’s going on. It would be great if it was smooth and wonderful all the time, but you get pockets of that, and sometimes you could be annoying.²⁴ Good marriages are characterized by a commitment to not withdraw, quit, or blame when difficulties arise, and to be tolerant of the partner's foibles. In return, we can ask for forgiveness for our faults.

Couples report that marriage has ebbs and flows like waves, and spouses should not catastrophize about the low period as a cause for divorce. The low point of general happiness, according to a global study, is midlife, around 48.²⁵ With patience, work, attention, and a leap of faith, another good wave appears, just as spring follows winter. Married for 26 years, author Scott Huber told me in our video interview that his marriage blossomed after their three kids moved out and he advises never giving up during hard times. He and his wife are now enjoying building a summer cabin in Wyoming by themselves.

After counseling couples for more than 30 years and learning from his own marriage of over 40 years, Gary Chapman (author of The Five Love Languages) observed that marriages are always in transition, like the seasons. He defines spring as a time of happy new beginnings. Summer is a time of deep satisfaction and constructive communication. (A study found that the happiest time in our lives is the late 30s, which seems like Chapman’s summer.²⁶) Fall is associated with uncertainty, blame, and nagging emptiness. Winter brings difficulty caused by rigid unwillingness to compromise, so couples feel hurt and angry.

Chapman found that the most common mistake that leads to fall and winter stages is allowing negative emotions to dictate their behavior,²⁷ rather than focusing on positive characteristics. As a Christian, he suggests following Jesus’ life of service to others. Chapman encourages learning about your partner’s love language and practicing empathetic listening (instead of egocentric listening) to enhance understanding. Then partners can learn from their differences and appreciate them.

Like Chapman, Jed Diamond, a therapist and author, identifies stages in marriages. He has been married three times so he has both personal and professional motivations to understand why marriages fail. In our video interview, he explains the five stages of marriage and also more extensively in his book The Enlightened Marriage.²⁸ He tells his clients that 90% of their problems have their roots in childhood, just as he was initially attracted to emotionally cold women like his mother. The unconscious hopes to heal the childhood wounds by repeating the pattern.

I can say my first two marriages were like a lot of other people in that I thought there were two stages. You look for that perfect partner, you fall in love in Stage One. In Stage Two you build a life together and live happily ever after. In my first marriage, I had children and after ten years it didn’t work out. We fell apart and then I tried it again, thinking I picked the wrong person the first time. I picked somebody else who I thought was right and got another divorce. If you’re a family therapist, teaching other people how to have a good relationship, it’s embarrassing when your relationship falls apart.

I thought, Before I do it again, I better learn some things, so I did therapy: healing myself, gaining more in-depth understanding. I developed these ideas that I have come to call The Five Stages of Love.

When I fell in love for the third time, I had a better sense of how to work together with my current wife so we’ve been married for 41 years. In fact, disillusionment in Stage Three is a useful stage in a good marriage, as a way the illusions that we project on our partner come down. Our childhood wounding creates a faulty love map so that in some way we’re recreating the unresolved problems we had in our families.

We get to Stage Four, real lasting love, when we’ve gotten past most of the illusions. It’s real because we have healed a lot of wounds from the past and it's lasting because we are no longer projecting our unmet needs on the other person. We have a partnership based on equality. [In Matthew Kelly’s Seven Levels of Intimacy he defines the highest level of intimacy as occurring when a couple can identify and explain their needs—including spiritual needs—and accommodate them as they change over time.]

Then, we are able to get Stage Five, finding our calling as a couple, our unique offerings to the world. We’re there to bring our own unique passions to something that we’re creating together, including our children and a shared vision of what we can bring to the world. What would it be like if we had a world where couples were living in harmony, where families were really healthy? What might that create in terms of better governments, education systems, policing, and ways the genders and ethnic groups and different sexual orientations can relate? That’s the potential and one of the things we teach at Men Alive [a program he founded, described on menalive.com].

Commitment is especially required when babies arrive on the scene. Numerous studies show marital satisfaction drops with the arrival of a baby because becoming servants to the demands of little ones is not romantic and the husband often feels displaced from his wife’s attention.²⁹ Having a baby should be delayed until the partners have time to bank fun times together, with spontaneous sex, travel, sleep, dates, and other enjoyable activities that are likely to diminish after a baby arrives. In step-families, with children on the scene from the beginning, the couple must plan how to create romance, reminding themselves that the solidity of their bonding is crucial for family solidarity and that divorce rates are higher in second marriages, according to some studies. What matters is, rather than blaming the ex-spouse, we learn from our own shortcomings.

Conflict is Inevitable

Commitment is also necessary when the inevitable conflicts occur between two imperfect humans. Issues that most often lead to marital conflicts are different attitudes about sex, child-rearing, money, and in-laws. Newer conflicts to add to the list are an equitable division of family work, competition over career success, and the use of leisure time. When a 2015 survey of married couples asked them how to have a successful marriage, they replied: shared interests (64%), a satisfying sexual relationship (61%), and sharing household chores (56%).³⁰ Sharing family work leads to a feeling of partnership and care, which studies show leads to more sex.

In 2020, psychologist Elizabeth Malarkey named the most common marital problems as infidelity, sexual differences, values and beliefs, life stages, traumatic situations, money problems, stress, boredom, and jealousy.³¹ Different temperament types can also cause conflicts, such as misunderstandings between introverts and extroverts, or those who value open options and those who value structure. Spouses report that a partner with ADD may try to release tension by creating an argument. After years of defending herself, Alexa decided to not respond to her husband’s confrontations and to give up expectations that he love her the way she’d like him to. She tells her husband, You win. I’m no longer fighting. He blusters but walks away.

Author Alain de Botton observed in a widely read article that differences are inevitable and that the best partner is not the romantic view of the ideal mate who shares all our interests, but the person who is good at disagreement and has the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity.³² Researcher John Gottman points out that 69% of marital arguments can’t be resolved because of fundamental differences, so they’re perpetual.³³ Love will have rocky and bumpy times, points out de Botton, so he suggests that we accept being sometimes lonely because we will not always be understood. He advises that we be as kind and understanding to our mate as we are to children, and to keep flirting (he defines it as awakening the other to their attractiveness).

Similar to Erich Fromm in his Art of Loving, de Botton observes that love is a verb, an action skill to be learned.³⁴ Yet most of the media focuses on the lead-up to the wedding, not the ongoing marriage itself, which by itself doesn’t bring happiness.³⁵ It glorifies perfectionism when no one is perfect, which de Botton views as a strange obsession. Robin Williams’ therapist character in the film Good Will Hunting explained to Will that your partner’s foibles are what makes the relationship special, like his wife loudly passing gas in her sleep. He said, People call these things imperfections, but they’re not, that’s the good stuff. He explained that what works is a set of flaws that match our own weird little world.

How to Have a 50/50 Marriage

Couples usually think of their marriage as fair because inequality feels natural and he often earns more. Egalitarian couples are aware of who has more leisure time and if decision-making is shared. Even men who say they share family work equally do only a little more than traditional men, according to a large survey described in American Couples by Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz. A survey of 15,000 wives revealed that those in poor marriages rarely had husbands who shared equally in the family work—only 8%—compared to the 63% of the wives who said they had excellent marriages.

A 50/50 husband reported, I thought my marriage was egalitarian because I helped out around the house. I never even thought about all the schedule making and mental notes my wife does. I'd come home and ask, 'What's for dinner?' Even though she is working full-time, I failed to recognize the inequality of such actions. This is a typical pattern repeating what is familiar to us from our childhoods.

More evidence of the husband's privileged status is that couples are much more likely to move to another city for his career than for hers. Marital satisfaction diminishes when the wife earns more than the husband unless the husband has feminist beliefs.³⁶ A 2019 study of over 6,000 US couples reported that many men were distressed if their wives earned more than 40% of their income.³⁷ Stanford historian Carl Degler concluded, Women's work in the main is still shaped around the family, while the family is still shaped around the work of men.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, women were more likely to be responsible for family work like supervising school children and were more likely to lose their jobs—over two million women left the workforce partly due to lack of a caregiving system.³⁸ This led to a 33-year-low workforce participation by women in 2021. Studies show a bias against mothers, resulting in lower salaries and the maternal wall, in contrast to women without children.³⁹ Fathers are considered more dependable than single men and their salaries don’t dip after becoming parents.

Equity issues are a major area of concern for spouses since dual-earner families have been the majority for over two decades.⁴⁰ Husbands are more satisfied than wives with their division of labor, which may be part of the reason women initiate about 70% of the US divorces. Also, wives are more like to blame their ex (64% of women blamed their spouse compared to 44% of the men in an Avvo study).⁴¹ Researcher Pepper Schwartz concluded that women are less fearful of independence generally.

In 2020, when The Pew Research Center asked about satisfaction with the division of household chores, 55% of married and cohabiting men were very satisfied, compared to only 38% of women.⁴² (Married couples tend to be more satisfied than unmarried couples.⁴³) A majority of women (59%) said they do more household chores than their partner but only 34% of men said their partner does more work—71% of women said they do most of the cooking.

Asked if they spent the right amount of time with their children, 46% of fathers and 58% of mothers said yes. When asked how satisfied they were with the balance between work and personal life, 48% of men were very satisfied compared to 40% of women. Regarding how well they communicated with their partner, 47% of men were very satisfied compared with 40% of women.

Comparing time use by mothers and fathers of young children, mothers spend more combined time working, doing household labor, and caring for children than fathers.⁴⁴ However, it’s important to enable fathers to have time to parent because children have better outcomes when their fathers are involved, as shown in Linda Nielsen’s review of 60 studies of shared parenting after divorce.⁴⁵

In an international comparison, mothers in all countries spend more time in child care than fathers. In the US, Canada, and France the gender gap is narrowing, while it’s widening in countries like Denmark and Spain.⁴⁶ The Pew survey found that more educated parents tend to spend more time with their children than less-educated parents, perhaps because they have more control over their time working. The Covid pandemic increased the time many parents—including fathers—spent with their kids.

The Nordic countries are a model for providing systems that enable shared parenting with paid family leave, paid vacation, affordable quality child and elder care, affordable university education, flexible work hours, and more. When Finnish writer Anu Partanen married an American and moved to New York, she met many women in the US who look for a husband who is successful financially. In Finland the individual is the unit, not the couple, so each person is taxed independently and women aren’t dependent on men.

Comparing the countries in her book The Nordic Theory of Everything, Partanen observed that the Nordic people she knows are much more relaxed, free of stress, and freer in general because of these social supports. In the World Happiness Report ranking of countries, Nordic countries have consistently ranked in the top ten countries for happiness since 2013 because they provide both autonomy and security.⁴⁷ The 2020 Best Countries for Raising Kids report ranked Denmark as the best, followed by Sweden, Norway, Canada, the Netherlands, and Finland. The US ranked #18. (Also see The Danish Way of Parenting by Jessica Joelle Alexander.)

The US corporate system relies on the unpaid partner who takes care of family life, freeing up her husband to work. Yet, most children grow up with both parents employed or 15% live in single-parent families, leading to a time squeeze, especially for mothers.⁴⁸ Only one-quarter of children under the age of 15 living in married-couple families had a stay-at-home mother (1% had a father in a similar role). Due to these changes, more companies now realize providing family benefits increases employee loyalty and productivity. Cisco ranked number one in a review of employers, and Facebook got favorable publicity when CEO Mark Zuckerberg took parental leave when each of his two daughters was born.⁴⁹

I interviewed gender pioneers, psychology professors Sandra and Daryl Bem when their children were ages two and five. In 1972, they were featured on the first Ms. Magazine cover. To raise their children with options, they limited their TV viewing, bought non-sexist books, used markers to change the gender in illustrations in traditional story books, and shared work.

They organized tasks by alternating them, doing tasks each liked, flipping a coin, hiring help, or leaving them undone. They alternated cooking and being the one in charge of parenting weekly. Daryl suggested that sometimes the mother needs to leave the house so the father learns to parent and not relate to her as the expert. (Sam and Rose experienced this when she went to graduate classes in Chicago, explained in their chapter.) The one in charge sets the standards. If they disagree, the person with the higher standards does that task. They often changed their system. Sandra advised stating what you will and will not do, such as I will clean toilets on this many days.

Daryl emphasized that the important thing is to divide the executive responsibility, which is what really clutters up your head, the one who is in charge of thinking about what needs to be done, such as meal planning. They define egalitarian as no one has priority because of gender, height (Sandra was short), earnings, etc. This requires truly caring about your partner and being willing to slow down work advancement. They’re best friends who fell in love, married when she was only 20 and he was 26. He gave her stability, in contrast to her chaotic parents, and she gave him the emotional expressiveness his parents lacked. Both were proud of their gender non-conformity. After 13 years of marriage, they told me they never felt bored.

However, these gender liberators separated after 30 years of marriage. Changes occurred as their children became teens and Daryl left more parenting to Sandra. She wasn’t willing to change their agreement, so she initiated their separation when their kids were 19 and 17, indicating that relationships evolve. Sandra wrote The Lenses of Gender (1994) and Unconventional Family (1998), which includes the thoughts of her children in their early 20s. After their separation, she had a brief same-sex relationship and Daryl entered a long-lasting same-sex relationship with another professor, documented in the film Bruce and Daryl (2018).

Sandra and Daryl remained a family, eating dinner together two or three times a week because Sandy and I are still kin. He was the one Sandra asked to be with her when she chose to end her life due to Alzheimer’s in 2014, and she told him I love you, Daryl. He believes they were more equal and better parents after they separated.

Their son Jeremy is a math genius with a Ph.D., who became a multimillionaire working for Google and retired to Montana. Their daughter Emily became an actress, drama teacher, and mother, living in Texas. Interviewed by their mother for Unconventional Family, overall they were pleased with the freedom they grew up with, unlimited by traditional gender roles. Jeremy said it boils down to I get to be a complete person, but suggested making it clearer that, It’s okay to have conventional desires [such as being attracted to women] as well as unconventional ones.⁵⁰ Emily felt privileged to have been raised by such visionaries, but also said it was sometimes difficult to so often deconstruct gender when it’s the heart of many people’s identities.

Daryl and Sandra agreed they didn’t separate due to their sexual orientations but due to growing apart in their parenting. She focused on the kids almost exclusively without other interests and most of her emotional bonding was with them. He focused on supporting her emotionally, avoiding conflict, and withdrawing his own feelings to avoid burdening her. He later realized that being a perpetual therapist is not being an optimal lover.⁵¹

In hindsight, he didn’t think that we were creative enough in refreshing our marriage with both shared and independent activities outside the family unit. This is one of the most common problems that undermine a marriage: The keys are renewal, nurturance, and attention to the couple bond.

Sharing family work and shared power like the Bems did when their children were young is good for children. I interviewed 164 dual-earner couples in the US and Canada for 50/50 Marriage and found 89 couples who thought of themselves as equal, but 71 were actually equal in their self-report of time spent in family work and childcare. These couples were more likely to score androgynous or masculine on the [Sandra] Bem Sex Role Inventory. As you would expect, men in the traditional couples were more likely to score masculine and the women to score feminine (the fourth possible score is undifferentiated—low on both).

Margaret Ferrin did phone interviews with 83 of their children for her psychology master’s thesis, comparing 42 children of 30 egalitarian couples equal in attitude and practice (EE) and 41 children of 26 traditional couples with both traditional attitudes and practice (TT).⁵² The EE children reported that their parents did, in fact, share parenting, giving more both responses than the TT children, and were more likely to support women’s rights.

The kids, ages 8 to 18, took the Bem Sex-Role Inventory and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. Ferrin found that the children of EE parents had higher self-esteem with no significant differences between girls and boys. The EE children were more likely to score masculine and androgynous than the TT kids, but not to statistical significance. Children who scored undifferentiated had lower self-esteem scores, while boys who scored masculine or androgynous had higher self-esteem in both EE and TT families.

My surveys and interviews with over 4,000 young people (mostly teens) from 81 countries, reported on in five books about global youth, revealed few gender differences in their attitudes and found that they’re altruistic.⁵³ When asked about their life purpose, their top responses were to do good works, achieve their personal goals, help family or country, and worship God. In my most recent youth book, Climate Girls Saving Our World, they expressed their Generation Y focus on social justice and diversity, as well as concern about the environment.

These studies of youth indicate the future of relationships is egalitarian, as is most of human history when we were hunters and gathers, as described in The Old Way by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and seen in the documentary The Hadza: The Last of the First (2014). This Tanzanian tribe still lives as our ancestors did, without hierarchy or chiefs. They do divide tasks by gender where the men hunt, make hunting tools, and roast meat, while the women and children gather roots and berries, boil meat, and make other things, but there is no rank except for recognition of exceptional skill.

Since shared family work is so important for marital satisfaction, here are suggestions.

How to Role-Share

•Keep a time diary for a week. The bottom line is to see who has the most leisure time; it should be equal. This may feel different than the family of origin.

•Make a list of all the family tasks, including finances, and divide them by preference, or take turns selecting tasks, or rotate them. Tasks that no one likes, such as cleaning the toilet, get more credit or points. Include administrative tasks like planning social events, buying gifts, and making shopping lists, and traditional men’s tasks like vehicle maintenance, yard work, driving, and repairs. Include children as they’re able to help and learn from Laurel and Steve’s system. If possible, hire help, as advised by Barbara and Jerry in their chapter. Acknowledge that child care is work, as Joe discovered when parenting three kids with Teresa.

•Follow the Bem family’s decision that the person in charge of a duty gets to set the standard. The one off duty can’t criticize. One of husbands’ main complaints is that wives nag and aren’t appreciative, while women often complain husbands don’t see what needs to be done and don’t multi-task.

•Review the conflict resolution skills described below.

•Use behavior modification to reward task completion such as a special meal or putting on dance music during family house cleaning.

What We Can Learn From Other Happy Couples

Marriage is a nuclear reactor that continually generates energy to allow you to do things you never could have imagined doing otherwise. Mehmet and Lisa Oz

Happily married in her first and in his second marriage, Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue interviewed 40 well-known couples married over 20 years. Their aim was to find out What Makes a Marriage Last. The couples revealed that the foundation of their marriages is the familiar theme of being best friends with chemistry, who find each other amusing and interesting. As Rob Reiner said, Find a best friend you can have sex with. It all comes down to chemistry, whether you’re 16 or 66, thinks Ron Howard. Jerry Sheindlin, married to television’s Judge Judy, discovered, You can’t replace the hug, the kiss, the making love. And in my case, she has a tremendous ability to make me laugh.

Kyra Sedgwick is delighted that she and her husband Kevin Bacon love hanging out together. She commented in a Redbook article that, after over 20 years of marriage, I never in a million years thought there would be sides to Kevin that I’m still learning. Our marriage is like a treasure; there are layers and layers of it. I’m constantly amazed that we are still surprised and interested in each other.

The couples interviewed by Thomas and Donahue emphasize the importance of trust, shared values, and mutual respect. Jesse Jackson makes the point, If you don’t have a foundation and shared values, that’s when the tree topples. Rebecca Gupta believes, It always comes back to that one word: respect. Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen share their spiritual values and meditate together in their special room where they also honor their ancestors with family photographs and mementos of their lives. Hiking together in nature is part of their spirituality.

However, conflicts and disagreements are inevitable even between best friends, generating anger and resentment. Jamie Lee Curtis said the key is, How much hatred can your marriage actually survive? [Not as much conflict as the Gates experienced.] Humor is foundational, she concluded. Some couples emphasize giving each other space, with the freedom to pursue different interests. You get a lot of strength from someone letting you be who you are, said Rob Reiner.

Lisa Oz suggests, The more varied experience you have in your life, the more interesting the marriage stays…you have to have something that keeps you interesting and interested. Otherwise, people get bored and take each other for granted. Ali Wentworth is an extrovert, and her husband George Stephanopoulos is an introvert, so they learned how to accommodate and change together. Sometimes we go solo [to an event]; we don’t need to be joined at the hip.

Often the famous couples’ solution to disagreements, similar to many of our 30 couples, is to seek counseling—Neil Patrick Harris and his husband go weekly. Elsa Walsh and Bob Woodward appreciate their Cognitive Behavioral Therapy counselor who teaches them how to identify distorted ways of thinking. Ask your partner to Tell me how you feel and Help me understand, suggests Mariska Hargitay.

Cheryl Howard advises that in a disagreement you use fewer words and try to distill your feelings down to fairly simple ideas. Don’t go on and on and on. Another actress with a good long-term marriage, Meryl Streep, said in an article that the secret is Goodwill and willingness to bend—and to shut up every once in a while. There's no road map on how to raise a family; it's always an enormous negotiation. Listening is everything.⁵⁴

Couples’ other suggestions for solving arguments are to record your conversation to playback to see if your perceptions are accurate, learn to negotiate and compromise, understand the triggers that lead to conflict, don’t go to bed angry, take a break if you’re very upset, and wait for the right time to bring up a problem. Alan Alda reported, You can’t avoid disagreements, but it’s important to remember that the person you’re disagreeing with is someone you love. Arlene and I express our love for each other a lot. Sometimes I wonder if other people do that.

The famous couples pointed out that children do indeed change the marriage: James Carville, the father of two daughters, found the power equation in that marriage is going to change dramatically as soon as the baby is born. At first, marriage is like an excited puppy dog, then responsibility comes in, said Jesse Jackson. (50/50 Parenting shares how to make the equation more equal, which is good for the children as well as the parents.) Kelly Ripa warned that Marriage is like a roller coaster ride. There are these great highs when you’ve got this tickling in your stomach and it feels amazing. Then you sink down to the depths and get scared.

Some of the couples use regular rituals to strengthen their relationship and keep it from getting boring over time, such as writing a letter to each other weekly or annually, weekly date nights or staycations, dinner at a formal table with no electronic screens on, and reading the Bible together every night like Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. On their 75th anniversary, he said before going to be they resolve any differences and kiss. Mary Matalin suggests sharing a project, books, daily music and laughter, and holding hands.

Matalin and Carville are an example of opposites attract, as they explain in Love and War. In their book, they explain that she’s a conservative Republican, while he’s a liberal Democrat (77% of US couples were in the same party, according to a Pew Research Institute survey in 2016.) She became an observant Catholic, he not so much. She has numerous pets that he adamantly dislikes. To cope with his ADHD, he likes rigid structure such as going to bed at 10 pm and going for a four-mile run at 3:00 pm, while she is anti-routine, anti-schedule. He doesn’t like to spend money, she does. He turns off lights; she doesn’t, which drives him nuts.

At times they couldn’t stand to even look at each other or talk to each other and couldn’t stand each other’s guts, as Mary said, usually because of passionate political disagreements. But they love each other desperately. James said that as his wife learned to understand his ADHD, you get to know each other as a couple and you respect each others’ differences. You accept the reality of who your spouse is. You make adjustments.⁵⁵

How did they stay together through their differences? They adore their two daughters who united us in a way nothing else could. They got us through, James explained.⁵⁶ Sex is also bonding: James said, It’s central to who I am. It’s like food or sleep. Although Mary grew up in Chicago, they both love living in New Orleans. James says being alike would be boring and explained that it doesn’t matter that they’re polar opposites because they don’t try to change each other: It’s better simply to let her be who she is. They got married when she was 40 and he was 49, well-established in their personalities. They are committed to not getting divorced; James said, Sticking around is the tougher choice, but also the better one.⁵⁷

Other Interviews with Happy Couples

Karl Pillemer stated that he conducted the largest in-depth study, based on interviews with 700 couples married for 30 years and more (45 years was the average), as reported in his 30 Lessons for Loving. Couples keep their spark burning by doing small, kind acts including surprises, being appreciative, doing volunteer work together, going on dates, laughing, being sexually active, traveling, and having fun together. They report that their marriage changes over time; it’s a process of growth, but life is short, so enjoy it!

The most frequent advice given by Pillemer’s couples is the importance of learning to communicate kindly and honestly without expecting the other to be a mind reader.⁵⁸ This may boil down to All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum: play fair, share, say you’re sorry, follow the Golden Rule, etc. Marriage is hard, many said to Pillemer, especially when dealing with disagreements. Some suggested setting a time limit for a difficult discussion, holding at least a monthly meeting to check in, writing to each other about the issue, taking it one day at a time, and being forgiving. One husband said, I learned from my wife how to love her. Yes, you teach one another how to love.⁵⁹ Many said that mutual respect is key to being an effective team.

A husband I interviewed, Fred,