Even the mosquitoes
Of the hundreds of responses we got when the Grant Study sent questionnaires out to the menâs children in 1986, there was only one family in which all the children checked off that their parentsâ marriage was âbetter than my friends,ââ That marriage was Fredrick and Catherine Chippâs. One daughter even scribbled in, âMuch better.â
By the time Fredrick Chipp was eighty, he (and his wife) had been giving their marriage rave reviews for six decades. The first time he met Catherine, the sixteen-year-old Chipp went home and told his mother, âI met the girl Iâm going to marry.â It took him a few years to get her to see it that way, but from then on, he says, âIâve lived happily ever after.â Not that there werenât changes along the way.
When he was seventy-five, Chipp described in an interview how their relationship has evolved. âShe has become more confident, and I have learned to adjust to that.â On their fiftieth wedding anniversary, he dug out the diary of his teenage years, in which he had described his future wife as âsimply swell.â The two of them started out sailing together. The day after our interview, sixty years later, they were planning to take off on vacationâtwo weeks of sailing. âI do the skilled and the nautical parts. I take chargeâitâs just instinct,â Chipp said. Catherine enjoyed the aesthetics. Every year for decades they went canoeing together in Nova Scotia, too. Chipp told me solemnly, âThat is important time.â
Iâve had readers complain that marriage isnât all vacation, and that stories like this donât tell us much about what the Chippsâ life together was like. My answer to that is: to the Chipps, all of life was a vacation. They enjoyed every bit of it, including the mosquitoes, as long as they were battling them together. You could feel it when you were with them. (And, as Eben Frostâs story below will remind you, in some marriages even the vacations arenât idyllic.)
Yet they didnât live in each otherâs pockets. Once Chipp retired (he was a successful schoolteacher and administrator), I asked him what it was like being home so much. He said that he and Catherine led different lives and had different passions. They shared what they shared, but âI do not impinge on her work.â They had supper and breakfast together, but they ate lunch separately. When I asked how they collaborated, he pointed to their lush gardens. Catherine did the planting and harvesting, Fredrick said, and he did the heavy labor. They walked together, three miles a day. They read to each other; the Chipps carried out even the (usually solo) act of reading in relationship. This year âthey had gone camping in Florida for two weeks; all three children and their families, including eight grandchildren, had come along too.
When I interviewed the Chipps for the first time they were forty-seven, and I was struck by how attractive Mrs. Chipp was. âThe lines on her face and her facial expressions were all happy,â I wrote in my notes. It made her unusually pretty. More than that, it was clear that humor, one of the most adaptive coping tools of all, was a great Chipp favorite.
They teased each other constantly. At seventy-five Chipp called his wife into the room to help him retrieve a name. âMy mindâs a blank,â he told her. âSo whatâs new?â said she. It reminded me of an encounter with another Grant Study wife in a warm marriage. I asked the routine Study question about whether divorce had ever been considered. âDivorce, never,â she replied without missing a beat. âMurder, frequently.â
âWhat about serious disagreements, though? I asked Mrs. Chipp how she resolved them. âThereâs nothing like losing your temper once in a while,â she said. âIt clears the air.â But she said it with great good humor. Her husband had told me separately that he believed in bringing conflict out into the open. They got angry occasionally, yes. But covert hostilities had no place in their relationship, while passive aggression is the coping technique most associated with bad marriages. The conflict-avoidant Penns, in contrast, just endured their mutual despair.
When Chipp was eighty-three, he and Catherine participated in Robert Waldingerâs study of marital intimacy. This recent development of the Grant Study is an example of how twenty-first-century social science is making attachment visible. Waldingerâs team has done extensive neuropsychological testing on both members of consenting couples; they have also videotaped couples in discussion of a âconflictual topic. Afterward, they telephone the partners individually every night for a week, to study their responses to the interaction (the âdaily diariesâ noted in Chapter 3). Waldinger is also compiling fMRIs on these couples, using the imaging study to visualize brain responses to positive and negative emotional stimuli. Waldinger taped the Chipps as they discussed a pressing conflict situation concerning two very disabled relatives and what the Chipps should do about their care. Fredrick Chipp is a taciturn person; his wife is verbal and outgoing. But they didnât waste time or effort struggling over whose point of view would prevail; every comment either one of them made was aimed at the problem of their relatives, and moved them closer to a solution. They were a couple dancing beautifully together. The follow-up questions about the conflict discussion included a query about âtrying to get my partner to understand.â âWe donât try; we do!â Mrs. Chipps interjected. For âthem, even conflict was filled with laughter.
After this intensive restudy, both Mr. and Mrs. Chipp at age eighty-five were rated as âsecurely attachedââattachment theoryâs healthiest classification, which implies among other things the kind of trust and comfort in a relationship that enable it to withstand the stresses of conflict and separation. They also did well in assessments of how they behaved to each other, scoring low on such variables as âderogation of partnerâ and high on âstated satisfaction,â âcare giving,â and âloving behavior.â
When that interviewer asked Chipp about his relationship with his wife, he replied, âI always felt this is somebody who has a lot of depth. Who has a soul within her that is something Iâm able to plumb, frequently. When I read a book or when she reads a book, for a second you may be deep in one yourself, but you want to share it with that other person.â
âMrs. Chipp put it this way: âI canât imagine not having him there. And this doesnât mean that we do everything together. . . . I would drive him crazy and he would drive me crazy. But we always know the other one is there and that we have this relationship and that makes us both very content. . . . Weâre very different. Weâre not different in what we like in life. Weâre very, very close in what we like in life.â
Rereading my own interview notes, I found a comment to myself: âHe was perhaps the happiest man in the Study.â I recalled the end of my interview with him five years before, when I had asked Chipp how he and his wife depended on each other. He looked off into space, choked up, and fought back tears. âGosh,â he blurted out, âjust by being there. If she goes first, it would be pretty traumatic.â
She did, and it was. Losing a spouse to death is often the most painful blow of old age.