Our legacy of love is being expressed through our artwork, our writing, and each time we share the love of our relationship on camera. Richard and I have been together for almost 42 years, and not one moment of it has felt wasted. When people ask us why we decided to sit down and talk openly about our relationship, the honest answer is that the world is in a lot of pain right now, and we believe love is genuinely good news worth sharing.
What we have learned across four decades is that a lasting, deeply satisfying relationship is simpler than most people expect, and far more possible than most people believe.
This is not a story about a perfect couple. It is a story about two people who chose each other clearly, kept choosing each other through every season of life, and built something that keeps growing even now, in our eighties. Here’s A Legacy of Love sharing what Richard and I learned over the years about creating a magnificent relationship for more than 4 decades.
Table of Contents
How Our Partnership Began
The First-Date Connection
The moment I knew Richard was someone extraordinary happened on the Santa Monica Freeway, somewhere between the Lincoln and Fifth Street offramps. It was our first date, and I was driving. He took my hand, looked at me, and said something so genuinely tender that I simply melted. There was an ease between us from the very beginning, a comfort we did not even have to think about.
The humor was there immediately too. I liked to laugh, and he made me laugh. That combination of warmth and lightness is what drew me in and what has never really left.
A Fast Start Into Shared Life
Things moved quickly, and neither of us apologized for that. We met in September. By November, Richard had moved into my house. I asked him point blank whether he was sure, since he was moving in with two teenagers, and he had never had children of his own. His answer was simple and completely disarming: what is yours is mine.
Two days after our first date, we were already meeting each other's families. That speed was not recklessness. It was recognition.
Marriage, Family, And Early Commitment
Richard and I eventually married in India, in a beautiful ceremony performed by a Brahman priest in a small village. When we came back to the States, we held a potluck wedding in the backyard. Both felt right, each in its own way.
Over the years, we have actually married each other five times, always renewing the commitment rather than replacing it. One of the vows we returned to was this: May we always remember that each day we have together may be our last. That is not a dark idea. It is the idea that makes everything more careful and more kind.
Growing Older Without Growing Apart
Why Time Makes Love More Precious
Richard is almost 85, and I recently turned 81. The reality of limited time does not frighten our relationship; it deepens it. There is simply no room left for carelessness. Every morning we wake up glad to see each other, and we mean it.
I used to think it was not possible to love more than 100 percent. Then we got old, and I revised that figure upward. 123 percent, at least, and I am not sure that is the ceiling.
Seeing Beauty Beyond Physical Change
You look in the mirror at a certain age and see a wrinkled mask that was not there before. Richard has his wrinkles too. And yet when I look at him, I see the handsomest, most beautiful person in the world. He says I must be blind. Maybe that is exactly the point.
What I actually see is the light behind the face, the whole person I have known and loved across four decades. The physical changes are not something to grieve; they are a reminder of how much time we have been lucky enough to share.
Facing Mortality With Tenderness
We talk honestly about the fact that one of us will outlive the other, and that the person left behind will carry a grief that is almost unimaginable. We each quietly hope we go first, not out of fear, but so the other does not have to suffer. That is the shape love takes when it is fully grown.
Living in that awareness does not make things morbid. It makes us present. There is no time to be unkind, no good reason to let a moment of tenderness go unexpressed.
Older couples who have built this kind of life carry something the world genuinely needs. The model we offer is not about being extraordinary people. It is about showing that peace really does begin at home, in the quality of attention you bring to the person closest to you. From there, it moves outward, into family, friendship, community, and beyond.
If more people built islands of peace in their own relationships, those islands would eventually connect. We believe that is how the world actually changes: not through politics or argument, but heart to heart.
Loving Promises: The Master Class for Creating Magnificent Relationship
The inspiration behind Loving Promises emerged from my own journey through three failed marriages, where I learned the hard way that a relationship is driven by "What can I get?" leads only to neediness and conflict. When I met Alice, her relentless generosity challenged my selfishness and pulled a capacity for love out of me I didn't know existed, transforming our union into a "living laboratory" for over four decades. I wrote this book to share the 39 specific behavioral promises I discovered that turn a negotiation of needs into a sanctuary of mutual giving, proving that when you make promises to yourself about how you will act, you create the foundation for a magnificent, enduring partnership.
LOVING PROMISES
The Master Class For Creating Magnificent Relationship
by Richard Matzkin
In this unique inquiry into the most profound incarnation of love, author Richard Matzkin looked to his extraordinary, three-decade-long marriage to Alice as a living laboratory to research the elements that comprise a truly loving, magnificent partnership. As a result, he discovered thirty-nine Loving Promises statements of intention you pledge to yourself, not your partner, that are the behavioral components of deep, abiding love.
These Promises are a profound path to transforming even a good relationship into a magnificent one.
The Creative Life They Built Together
How Love Rekindled Our Art
When Richard and I got together, neither of us was practicing art, even though we were both born artists. The relationship changed that. Something about the energy between us pushed us back toward creativity in a way that felt urgent and natural at the same time.
I returned to painting. Richard discovered the drums in a somewhat accidental way when he bought my son Jason a drum set, set it up in the garage, and then never really let Jason near it again. He was hooked from the first moment.
From Sculpture And Painting To Books
I signed Richard up for a sculpture class, and it turned out he had a real gift. He went on to create striking, beautiful sculptures, many of them focused on aging and the human face over time. His portraiture work carried a quiet dignity that matched exactly what we were both trying to understand about growing older.
My paintings of older people eventually found their way to the Smithsonian. One piece was hung in the White House through Chelsea Clinton. I was featured on Oprah. None of that was the plan; it was the result of following the work honestly and letting it go where it needed to go.
The Art Of Aging And Their Wider Message
Out of our parallel creative journeys, Richard and I wrote The Art of Aging, which went on to win awards. It became one of several books Richard has written. His other titles include Love and Time, Loving Promises, Becoming Love-able, and MANifesto, each one a careful, authentic piece of writing about love and the passage of time.
The creative work was how we processed our own curiosity and sometimes our fears about aging. Meeting the people we painted and sculpted gave us their wisdom in return. It set us firmly on the path of looking for what is genuinely good about growing older, and we have been on that path ever since.
THE ART OF AGING
Celebrating the Authentic Aging Self
by Alice & Richard Matzkin
In their award-winning book, The Art of Aging, painter Alice Matzkin and sculptor Richard Matzkin share the wisdom of elder mentors to look for the positive side of growing older and coming to accept and appreciate their aging.
Throughout this beautiful and touching book, the couple explores the experience of aging through their paintings, sculptures and writings. In a series of projects that confront their fear and curiosity about growing old, they examine physical changes, sensuality and relationships, aging parents, spirituality, and death. Drawing on their personal experiences and the wisdom of older mentors, they conclude that the elder years can be a time of ripening and harvest rather than stagnation and despair. Their art features well-known people such as feminist Betty Friedan and potter Beatrice Wood, friends, neighbors, relatives, and themselves. Both artists find a source of creativity in the older nude body. This profusely illustrated book contains a wealth of inspiration, especially for those about to enter their later years.
A Model Of Wise Elder Love
A Call to Wise Elders: Leaving A Legacy Of Goodness For Future Generations
Richard and I did not end up with a strong, peaceful relationship by accident. We made it. We could have damaged it early on; plenty of good beginnings go wrong. What kept it intact was consistent kindness, honest speech, and the daily decision to express love in behavior rather than just in words.
A few days ago, clouds covered the sun while we were sitting outside and I slipped inside to get Richard a shawl. The next evening, I was cold in bed and he put socks on my feet. Those are not small gestures filed under romance. They are love made real, moment by moment. That is what we mean when we say kindness is love in action.
A CALL TO WISE ELDERS
Leaving A Legacy Of Goodness For Future Generations
by Richard Matzkin
“This book is not only a call to action, it is an affirmation that old age can be a life stage with meaning and purpose of its own.” —Carol Orsborn, PhD
“But I'm old,” you say, “Let me relax and enjoy my `Golden Years.' Yes, the world's a mess, but let the younger generations deal with it. It's their world now.”
Except it isn't. It's our world, too. And we in the older generation bear responsibility for helping to create the mess.
We're not too old and it's not too late.
In this timely book, author Richard Matzkin shows how those in the elder generation can be of service and leave a legacy of goodness through their wise words, their beneficial actions, and their wholesome example. The reader will find valuable information and practical suggestions that can help elders define and bring their legacy into reality.
What is a legacy of love?
A legacy of love is not a monument or an award. It is the accumulation of daily choices to be kind, to show up, to trust completely, and to keep saying and meaning the words.
For Richard and me, that legacy lives in the paintings, sculptures, and books we have made together. It lives in the family around us and the friends who have grown close over forty-plus years. It lives in the fact that we still wake up every morning genuinely glad to be in the same room.
The legacy is also in what we try to give outward. Every act of kindness affects someone else, and they pass it on. That is not a theory for us; it is something we have watched happen. World peace is a large idea, but it has a very practical starting point: the way you treat the person sleeping beside you.
What the world needs is not complicated. It is exactly what we found on a freeway in Los Angeles more than four decades ago: warmth, humor, trust, and the willingness to take someone's hand and mean it.
Legacy of Love Quotes
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." — Maya Angelou
"Love is space and time measured by the heart." — Marcel Proust
“Love conquers all things, so we too shall yield to love.” Virgil, Roman poet
