Herbert and Zelmyra Fisher held the record for the longest marriage at 85 years, and credited it to learning to bend rather than break, and to never keeping score. Marriage therapists see the same principles clinically: flexibility under strain, refusing to treat the relationship as a contest, and the repair value of shared laughter.
Eighty-five years
In 2009 the record was set for the longest marriage: Herbert and Zelmyra Fisher had been married eighty-five years.
When I heard that, I was impressed enough to go looking for how they had done it. Marriage is hard for every couple at some point, and I wanted to know how they had got through the difficult stretches — not the happy ones, which are never the problem.
They gave an interview on Valentine's Day in which they answered fourteen questions about their relationship and how it had lasted. What struck me most was that they talked openly about the arguments they had had over the years. They did not present a marriage without conflict. They presented a marriage that survived it.
Zelmyra's summary of how: learning to bend, not break.
Bending under load
As a marriage and family therapist, I spend a lot of time with people who are at their breaking point.
The image of the straw that breaks the camel's back comes up in my office regularly. Somebody arrives describing a final small thing — a comment, a forgotten errand, a tone of voice — that is plainly not proportionate to the reaction it produced. It is never really about the straw. It is about everything already loaded onto that back before it arrived.
Bending rather than breaking is a good description of what resilient couples actually do, and it is worth being specific about what it involves.
It means being able to absorb strain without the structure failing. Giving where giving is possible, so the load redistributes instead of concentrating on one point. And it means noticing the accumulating weight before the last straw, rather than after.
Most couples I see are not short on love. They are short on flexibility — usually because at some stage one or both people concluded that bending was the same as losing.
Never keep score
The other line of theirs I have never forgotten: marriage is not a contest. Never keep score. God has put the two of you on the same team to win.
That is a simple sentence with a great deal in it.
Scorekeeping is one of the most reliable indicators that a marriage is in difficulty, and it is remarkably easy to slip into. It starts as fairness — a reasonable wish for contributions to be roughly balanced — and becomes an accounting system in which every act is logged.
Once the ledger exists, everything changes character. A request for help stops being a request and becomes a claim. A concession stops being generosity and becomes an entry to be recovered later. And because each person can only see their own column, both are entirely certain they are ahead in effort and behind in reward.
The problem is not that the accounting is inaccurate. It is that the framework is adversarial, and adversarial frameworks produce adversaries.
The decision to laugh
There is a related idea I have found genuinely useful in the office.
In their book Love That Lasts, Gary and Joy Lundberg write about surviving the arguments of marriage, and one of the best things they suggest a couple can do is make a conscious decision to laugh.
In the micro-culture of any marriage there are hundreds of rules and expectations, most of them never stated out loud and many never consciously decided. A good deal of what couples fight about is this system not making sense.
I have learned the value of helping clients find the humor in the arguments they are having, and of teaching them to find it themselves.
I want to be careful here. This does not mean I take the hurts and betrayals lightly — there are many tears in the course of couples counseling, and some of what people bring is genuinely devastating. Nothing about humor is meant to skip over that.
But as Marie Osmond once put it: if you are going to look back at something and laugh, why not do it now?
Laughter in a marriage does real work. It bonds, and it helps repair hurts both current and old. If you and your spouse have forgotten how to laugh together, that is worth treating as a symptom rather than a triviality.
If you are near the break point
If you are approaching that point — or if you feel you have been broken several times already — you deserve help learning how to bend instead.
That is a large part of what we do. Our therapists work with couples before and after the straw has landed, in Orem, Murray, and online across Utah.
You both deserve to laugh. Let us see whether you can do it together again.
Start with a free 30-minute consultation: 801.272.3420, text 801.997.8760, or book online.
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