Last week, Kate and I attended a wedding. It’s been a long time since we’ve been to one. Maybe your 50s is when that happens, that age where the wedding guests are the children of our friends.

I sat there watching this young couple, listening to them read their vows to one another. Listening to the bridal party speeches. Her mother and her father, who have been together their entire lives, on their first marriage. The groom’s parents, who have been together their entire lives, on their first marriage, having raised four boys together.

And as we talked to other couples at the wedding, you invariably get into one another’s stories. How you met. Where you lived. What you’ve done. Because when you get to midlife, you’re at a point where almost half your life, and in my case, more than half, has been spent with your person.

It got me thinking about one question.

What’s the secret to loving the same woman for a lifetime?

I don’t have a grandfather alive to ask. But I came across a piece online from a man who asked his grandfather, after sixty years of marriage, what he had learned. I thought his answer was worth sharing because his answer wasn’t about communication. It wasn’t about trust. It wasn’t about date nights.

It was this: you don’t love the same woman.

Every few years, she changes. And if you don’t update the way that you love her, you lose her. The woman he married at 22 wasn’t the same woman at 30. Motherhood changed her. Hardships changed her. Time changed her. At 40, she needed respect more than romance. At 50, she needed partnership more than passion. At 60, she needed presence more than promises. And every time she changed, he had a choice: complain that she wasn’t the woman he fell in love with, or fall in love with the woman she was becoming.

The biggest mistake people make is thinking that love stays the same. That you fall in love once, and then you stop paying attention. Loving someone for a lifetime means staying curious about them. Keep learning them. Keep noticing them. Keep choosing them. Because the moment you stop discovering the person beside you, someone else eventually will.

Sixty years. Not because it was easy. Because they never stopped getting to know each other.

I found this to be particularly true.

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The person I was in my 20s is not the person I was in my 30s, or my 40s. And here I am in my 50s. Kate’s not the same person either. We’ve had to work very hard to appreciate the changes in one another, both the good and the bad.

No matter how much you think you’ve picked the right person, the right person has also chosen you. I didn’t know what kind of mother Kate was really going to be. I didn’t know what it was really going to be like for us when the shit hit the fan. Neither did she. Much of this is a leap of faith.

You don’t know in your 20s how somebody is going to approach their 40s, their 50s, their 60s. You can grow together. You can grow apart. But you cannot remain the same. And you cannot expect them to.

So what do you do if you’ve stopped paying attention?

You start again. Tonight.

In my experience, most men in midlife didn’t drift from their marriages on purpose. They got comfortable. They prioritized work, money, fitness, their friends, and assumed the marriage would take care of itself. The relationship became infrastructure instead of investment. And one day they looked up and realized they were living alongside someone they no longer fully knew.

That’s not a reason to panic. It’s a reason to pay attention.

The first step is the hardest one, acknowledge it. Not to a therapist. Not in your head. Out loud, to her. You’re disconnected. You know it. She knows it. Pretending otherwise doesn’t protect anything.

From there, it’s simple. Not easy. Simple.

Get curious again. Ask her something you don’t already know the answer to, and not about the calendar or the kids. About her. What she’s thinking about. What she wants. What she’s worried about. What she’s excited about. Then actually listen.

One thing I talk at length with my clients about is that it’s not enough to just love her. You have to like her.

You have to like being with her. You have to like being around her. You have to like doing things with her. And you have to like the fact that you both do things independently as well, that you each have your own lives, your own interests, your own space. That’s not distance. That’s respect. That’s relationship maturity. A good marriage isn’t two people who are attached at the hip. It’s two people who genuinely enjoy coming back together.

And you have to let the little shit that you don’t like about each other, and there will always be little shit, not affect the bigger things that you do. Every marriage has friction. The ones that last aren’t the ones without it. They’re the ones where both people decided the friction wasn’t bigger than the foundation.

That is a big part of showing back up. That is a big part of having a marriage that is happy, successful, loving, and respectful. Like each other. Choose to like each other. Every day.

Stop waiting for the right moment or the right trip or the right gesture. Recommitment in midlife doesn’t look like a grand romantic weekend and material gift giving. It looks like consistent, daily attention. Noticing her. Choosing her. Again. The same way you did before you stopped.

The grandfather didn’t have a secret formula. He just never stopped showing up.

Neither should you.

In Health, 

Greg Scheinman

Founder, Midlife Male

Husband. Father. Entrepreneur. Coach.

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