Best Marriage Advice From a 92-year-Old and a Survivor of a Gray Divorce

My own marriage failed, but it wasn’t because I didn’t follow my Dad’s advice.

AI image generated by the author

I thought my marriage would last if I followed my parents’ model of marriage. They were married for 70 years in a union everyone said wouldn’t last. In New York in 1953, parental consent was required for marriage if you were under 21 years old.

My 19-year-old father’s mother tried to talk my father out of marrying the girl from “the wrong side of the tracks,” as they waited at the bus stop to go to city hall for their marriage license. He was an Italian Catholic, and my mother was Jewish; both cultures frowned upon marriage outside of their own faith.

They ignored my grandmother and got married in the Catholic Church.

Their marriage lasted 70 years until my mother passed away at age 88. I looked to their example and tried to follow my father’s best advice for making it last:

• “If you get mad,” he often said, “forget about it the next day.”
• “Don’t run when it rains,” was offered as a hard rule.
• “Choose each other every day,” he told me as if it were a secret rule only to be learned by future generations.

I found out that following this advice only worked when both the husband and wife followed the same approach. When I was mad at my ex-husband, it seemed as if there weren’t enough new days to start again.

I spent too many nights awake trying to think of how to fix what was broken. He seemed to be awake nights planning his exit.

Unfortunately, I was the only one in the marriage who didn’t run when it rained. I knew it was wise to choose to love my husband every day, but it couldn’t work when he wasn’t doing the same.

There were a couple of big speed bumps early in our marriage that could have spelled a quick end, but I believed in commitment and was able to put the past in the past and move forward even after my husband nearly bankrupted us with a secret investment scheme that never smelled right to me.

Following my father’s advice will be colored by your own experience and your values. If their generation chased endurance, ours chased soul mates. We were taught that if love stopped feeling right, it was OK to leave. This idea was completely foreign to my parents’ generation. They were taught that you stayed until someone died, no matter what.

If you asked my mother for her secret to a lasting marriage, she would have said, “We’re still together because murder is still illegal.” This meant life wasn’t always easy, and there was plenty to fight about. Sometimes they wanted to kill each other.

But theirs was a generation that just woke up the next day and forgot about what was bothering them the day before. In this way, they kept it going until they were parted by death, just as they promised they would in church in 1953.

[embed]Get an email whenever Victoria Ponte publishes. Get an email whenever Victoria Ponte publishes. If you enjoyed this story, please subscribe to get an email when I…brooksidevic.medium.com

Victoria Ponte — 2025.