Every lasting marriage, including my own of more than four decades, sees each day as another opportunity to grow and be happy together. It’s not about perfection, it’s about consistently showing up to see that magnificent being with whom you get to share your life. Asking how to have a successful marriage is really a question about how do you keep showing up to choose that person as your partner in life. Here’s how Alice and I built a passionate and love relationship that started more than 4 decades ago.
Before I met Alice, I stumbled through three failed marriages. Looking back on my younger years, I could see my selfishness in those relationships. I could see my neediness. Then I met the most generous person I've ever encountered: Alice.
Alice and I have been together for over 40 years. People who know us consider us models of a perfect couple. Even strangers comment on our obvious love for each other. I'm not boasting, I share it because I want you to know that what we have is not accidental. We built this relationship. Our successful marriage is the result of deliberate, sustained, daily practice. Here's what we practice.
Key Points
- The shift from "What can I get?" to "What can I give?" is the foundation of a magnificent relationship
- Love is defined as behavior, not just feeling—the way you act toward your beloved matters most
- The Loving Promises are 39 statements of intention that are promises made to yourself, not your partner, because only you control your behavior
Table of Contents
Your Intention
The foundation to a successful marriage starts with your intent for your partner's growth and happiness. Alice and I both do this for each other. That reciprocity, that discipline of returning to this grounding intention is the single most powerful decision you can make in a marriage. It makes the growth of the relationship and the happiness of the individuals carried in it the focus of your partnership. After every fight, after each personal retreat, come back to this intention. We want each other to be happy.
Shift the Inner Question
Moving from the intention for your partner's growth and happiness shifts the way we think. In my past relationships I always focused on "What can I get?" from the other person. Alice was so giving, that I didn't need to think about this anymore because that thinking comes from a scarcity mindset. I wasn't in the desert anymore when I met Alice. Her generosity shifted my attention to a new question, to "What can I offer my partner?"
Most relationship advice focuses on helping you get the love you want and getting your needs met. But it is precisely that self-centered, grasping orientation that creates the problems in the first place. When you turn your attention toward uplifting your partner, a remarkable shift happens. Focus on your own behavior because only this is in your hands to change. You receive more love, because you open up the floodgates to each others' hearts. Your thirst becomes mutually quenched. For me, this was the first time I had every experienced that and it's still remains my experience of being with my wife in my eighties. It's not a competition. It's mutual support between two twin flames.
Make Promises to Yourself
The heart of my book, Loving Promises: The Master Class for Creating Magnificent Relationship, is a set of 39 statements of intention about love in relationship. These are not promises you make to your partner. They are promises you make to yourself, because only you are in control of your behavior. The loving behaviors you bring to the relationship set the tone. Each promise is a distinct facet of love, and together they constitute love in action. They define what love looks like when it is lived, not merely felt.
Accept That You Are Wounded
No matter how well put together we may seem on the surface, every one of us has a sad, scared child somewhere inside. Your partner carries wounds just as you do. When you remember this, you look upon them with more patience and forbearance. You offer empathy instead of criticism, kindness instead of judgment. And in the process of offering healing to your partner, you heal yourself.
Stay Committed
I came of age in the sixties, when lifetime commitment was considered passé by many in my generation. When the going got tough, you got going. This never worked for me. The strong roots of a magnificent relationship are forged by an enduring commitment to stay, to work through the difficult passages, to not abandon the project when it becomes uncomfortable. Alice and I have plumbed the deepest levels of love precisely because we refused to leave.
Begin Where You Are
You do not need to become a fully realized master of love before you can have a magnificent relationship. Relationship and maturity are ongoing growth processes. You learn by doing. You receive instant feedback from your partner when you tread the loving path, and an even quicker response when you deviate. Start today. Ask yourself, in this moment, in this interaction: What can I give? To help you discover your onw promises, I wrote the guidebook Loving Promises: The Master Class for Creating Magnificent Relationship using the 39 promises we use in my own marriage as an example.
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.
Embrace Change
Change is not the enemy of a good marriage. Resistance to change is what creates conflict. If one person is moving along and the other is stuck, then you have someone there with you to move through the resistance. Having someone at your side to face the challenges is an incentive to adapt to the challenges, because you will make it happen together. Every long partnership passes through seasons that require both people to release who they were and become who they are becoming, together.
Adapting To Different Seasons Of Life
A marriage that began in your late twenties will not look the same at fifty, or sixty-five, or seventy. Careers shift. Bodies change. Children arrive and leave. Parents age and die. The couple that weathers these transitions is not the couple who held everything constant; it is the couple who remained curious about each other through every change. Alice and I met in our 40's so we had already discovered what we didn't want in a relationship. Together we figured out what we did want. We both had to change to make it happen. The right partner will be worth stepping out of your comfort zone to grow.
I have noticed that couples who struggle most with midlife transitions are often those who expected their partner to stay exactly the person they married. Letting your partner grow and falling in love with who they are becoming, keeps the relationship alive.
Letting Love Mature With Time
Early love is urgent and consuming. Mature love is steadier and in many ways richer. It carries the texture of shared memory, the ease of real familiarity, and a tenderness built from having been known and still chosen.
The Art of Aging, the award-winning book Alice and I made together, explores how aging is a deepening, a ripening of who you are. When two people commit to growing old together with honesty and grace, love takes on a gravity and beauty that younger love cannot quite reach.
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.
Creating A Legacy of Love Through Partnership
A marriage that has been lived with intention accumulates something beyond personal happiness. It becomes a kind of testimony.
I think about this more as I move further into the later years of my partnership with Alice. The YouTube video A Legacy of Love captures some of this: the idea that a long marriage, lived with honesty and care, offers something to the world around it. Not a performance of perfection, but a visible example of what devotion over time actually looks like.
Children who witness a loving, respectful marriage carry something forward. Friends touched by a couple's way of being together are quietly shaped by it. Elders who remain devoted to each other model a possibility that younger people often cannot yet imagine but instinctively need.
A legacy of love is not built in the spotlight. It is built in the ordinary repetitions: in how you speak to each other in the kitchen, in how you fight and come back, in how you hold each other when grief arrives, in how you choose, again and again, the life you have made together.
That is the marriage worth building. Not the one that looks good from the outside, but the one that holds, deepens, and keeps giving across every season of a life shared.
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.
Successful Love Marriage Quotes
"A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person." — Mignon McLaughlin
"A good marriage is the union of two good forgivers." — Ruth Bell Graham
"A great marriage isn't something that just happens; it's something that must be created." — Fawn Weaver
