Even the mosquitoes

Of the hundreds of responses we got when the Grant Study sent questionnaires out to the men’s children in 1986, there was only one family in which all the children checked off that their parents’ marriage was “better than my friends,’” That marriage was Fredrick and Catherine Chipp’s. One daughter even scribbled in, “Much better.”

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, “I met the girl I’m going to marry.” It took him a few years to get her to see it that way, but from then on, he says, “I’ve lived happily ever after.” Not that there weren’t changes along the way.

When he was seventy-five, Chipp described in an interview how their relationship has evolved. “She has become more confident, and I have learned to adjust to that.” On their fiftieth wedding anniversary, he dug out the diary of his teenage years, in which he had described his future wife as “simply swell.” The two of them started out sailing together. The day after our interview, sixty years later, they were planning to take off on vacation—two weeks of sailing. “I do the skilled and the nautical parts. I take charge—it’s just instinct,” Chipp said. Catherine enjoyed the aesthetics. Every year for decades they went canoeing together in Nova Scotia, too. Chipp told me solemnly, “That is important time.”

I’ve had readers complain that marriage isn’t all vacation, and that stories like this don’t tell us much about what the Chipps’ 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 Frost’s story below will remind you, in some marriages even the vacations aren’t idyllic.)

Yet they didn’t live in each other’s 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 “I do not impinge on her work.” 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 “they 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. “The lines on her face and her facial expressions were all happy,” 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. “My mind’s a blank,” he told her. “So what’s new?” 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. “Divorce, never,” she replied without missing a beat. “Murder, frequently.”

“What about serious disagreements, though? I asked Mrs. Chipp how she resolved them. “There’s nothing like losing your temper once in a while,” she said. “It clears the air.” 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 Waldinger’s 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. Waldinger’s team has done extensive neuropsychological testing on both members of consenting couples; they have also videotaped couples in discussion of a “conflictual topic. Afterward, they telephone the partners individually every night for a week, to study their responses to the interaction (the “daily diaries” 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 didn’t 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 “trying to get my partner to understand.” “We don’t try; we do!” Mrs. Chipps interjected. For “them, even conflict was filled with laughter.

After this intensive restudy, both Mr. and Mrs. Chipp at age eighty-five were rated as “securely attached”—attachment theory’s 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 “derogation of partner” and high on “stated satisfaction,” “care giving,” and “loving behavior.”

When that interviewer asked Chipp about his relationship with his wife, he replied, “I always felt this is somebody who has a lot of depth. Who has a soul within her that is something I’m 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.”

“Mrs. Chipp put it this way: “I can’t imagine not having him there. And this doesn’t 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. . . . We’re very different. We’re not different in what we like in life. We’re very, very close in what we like in life.”

Rereading my own interview notes, I found a comment to myself: “He was perhaps the happiest man in the Study.” 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. “Gosh,” he blurted out, “just by being there. If she goes first, it would be pretty traumatic.”

She did, and it was. Losing a spouse to death is often the most painful blow of old age.