My grandparents have been married 40 years… how are people actually doing this??
By Eli Mercer on
Okay y’all, I need to talk about something. My grandparents just hit 40 years of marriage. Forty. Years.
And I’m sitting at their kitchen table watching them argue about how to load the dishwasher the same argument they’ve probably had since the 80s and somehow it’s… cute? Not toxic. Not explosive. Just familiar.
Meanwhile, I look around at people my age and marriage feels like a high-stakes group project nobody was trained for. We’re juggling student loans, burnout, therapy language, social media comparisons, identity growth, and many things. It’s a lot.
These days, we’re taught (rightfully) not to tolerate abuse, not to shrink ourselves, not to stay somewhere unsafe. And I 100% agree with that. But I also wonder if we’ve lost something about endurance. About learning someone’s wiring instead of expecting them to come pre-installed with compatibility.
Maybe long marriages aren’t about constant romance. Maybe they’re about emotional regulation and repair.