For Better or for Terse

If you hang around long enough in the anterooms of late marriage — dentists’ offices with ceiling-mounted televisions tuned to muted home improvement shows, the Chinese buffet where you just spotted a couple of feisty old gals with verboten Tupperware lids protruding from their purses, the slow checkout lines of grocery stores — you will have observed two distinct species of elderly couples who superficially appear, at first glance, to be engaged in the same long project (i.e., remaining married).

Succumbing to an idle, irresistible urge for a more nuanced anthropological inspection, however, you also will have noticed the two species pursuing radically different metaphysical enterprises — as divergent as, say, artisanal sourdough and the concept of time itself.

The first type were referred to in a recent newspaper article I chanced across as the Silently Divorced, though the term itself is misleading in the way that “lightly salted” pretzels are misleading (they are not lightly salted; they are salted with the quiet fury of a disappointed tech-bro oligarch).

In what feels like a different universe but is in fact the same buffet line at a mid-range eatery — there exists the second type: those improbably synchronized pairs whose lives appear to orbit each other with the precision of a two-body system that has somehow escaped the gravitational chaos that afflicts the rest of us.

The absurdity is that both types look, from a sufficient distance, exactly the same: two people who got married and never divorced (in the legal sense of the word). The census does not distinguish between them. There is no checkbox for “emotionally estranged cohabitants” versus “perfectly matched existential co-conspirators.”

From the outside, the metrics are identical: years together, shared address, a joint history that can be summarized in photographs and holiday newsletters.

Which means that the real difference — the vast, qualitative gulf between quiet disengagement and ongoing intimacy — remains largely invisible, detectable only in small, easily overlooked details: the way a question is asked (or not asked), the presence or absence of a follow-up, the subtle lean of one body toward or away from another. (In some priceless photos with the Orange Julius Caesar, the Slovenian Sphinx has that last bit down to an art.)

What follows are two highly scientific, sociocultural case studies of the two brands. Eat your heart out, Margaret Mead.

1. Case Study: Love, Honour and Mayday (Specimen A & B)
   

There is a time, roughly 7:12 p.m., when A (who once had hobbies that involved other humans but now maintains a deep, almost monastic relationship with a tablet device and weather apps for cities he does not live in) asks B, “Did you turn off the outside light?” and B says, “I think so,” and this exchange — this exact exchange, with minor seasonal variations — has occurred approximately 11,000 times over the course of their shared life.

The important thing is not the content of the question (the outside light is almost certainly off, and if it isn’t, it will remain on without catastrophic consequence), but the fact that this is what remains of dialogue after 51 years: a series of maintenance-level inquiries, like two mid-level employees in adjacent departments who are vaguely aware that their workflows intersect but cannot quite remember how. They met, if the archival footage (wedding photos in an album that now requires reading glasses to interpret) is to be believed, with genuine enthusiasm. There was laughter that appears unforced. There are photographs in which they are touching each other in ways that suggest not just obligation but desire, even curiosity.

At some point, there were inside jokes. These jokes have not disappeared so much as fossilized; they exist now as references to references, invoked occasionally with the faint, dutiful smile of someone acknowledging a historical landmark to which they no longer feel any particular attachment.

There is, in the hallway closet, a box of artifacts — ticket stubs, old letters, a dried flower pressed between the pages of a book neither has opened in decades — that could, if examined with sufficient care and emotional risk, function as a kind of archaeological map back to whatever it was that once animated them.

The box remains unopened. Not because it is forbidden, exactly, but because opening it would introduce variables. Scenes, no ... smithereens from a marriage.

Their children — now fully formed adults with their own subscriptions, passwords and minor back problems — call on Sundays. These calls are conducted on speakerphone, which has the effect of turning conversation into a low-stakes panel discussion. A reports on the weather. B reports on a neighbour’s amusing antics with a garbage bin.

The children report on busyness, which has become the default condition of middle adulthood, a kind of socially sanctioned inaccessibility. And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon, little boy blue and the man on the moon …

After the call, there is a brief silence. This silence is different from the others in that it contains, for a fraction of a second, the possibility of expansion — of one of them saying something unscripted, something that deviates from the established conversational template. This possibility is perceived, dimly, like a shape at the edge of vision, and then just as quickly dismissed. A clears his throat. B asks if he wants tea. The system resets. Control option command.

Through the years, some pretty great authors have observed such couples at various stages of their lives. Emma and Charles Bovary in Madame Bovary. Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Hedda (“I’m bored! Bored! I am so bored!”) and George Tesman in Hedda Gabler.

Of necessity, the consequences of such soul-sucking relationships in literature tend to be more dramatic than in real life. We’d all be bored! bored! so bored! if there weren’t more to fiction than Joseph Conrad’s yawning observation in Lord Jim — which I happen to be rereading right now — of “married couples looking domesticated and bored with each other in the midst of their travels.”

And that was before cellphones.

It would be easy, and perhaps unfair, to characterize all of this as purely tragic. For there is, after all, a kind of equilibrium here. Typically, such couples do not fight. They do not inflict acute pain on each other. They have, through a long process of mutual calibration, eliminated most sources of friction.

The house runs. The bills are paid. The outside light is, more often than not, turned off before bedtime.

But the cost of this equilibrium is the near-total absence of surprise. Nothing new enters the system because nothing new is invited. Each has, in some quiet, unannounced way, stopped presenting themselves as a subject to the other — as a person with evolving thoughts, inconvenient desires or the capacity to change in ways that might require renegotiation.

At night, they watch television. Not together, exactly, but in parallel — two lines extending indefinitely in the same direction without intersecting. Occasionally, one will laugh. The other will not ask why.

And here is the darkest, most absurd detail: If you were to ask either A or B, separately, whether they are “unhappy,” there is a strong chance they would look up from their cellphones at dinner and say no.

Not defensively, not even inaccurately. Because unhappiness implies a comparison to some other, more desirable state, and that comparative framework has, over time, been gently decommissioned. This is simply what life is. The baseline has become the definition.

II. Case Study: The Duprass (Specimen C & D)

C and D appear, frankly, a little suspicious.

Not in the sense that they are hiding anything, but in the sense that their continued, mutual delight in each other violates several widely accepted informal laws of long-term human cohabitation. They have been married those same 51 years, which is long enough for most couples to have cycled through affection, irritation, resignation and a kind of polite détente.

C and D appear to have bypassed or perhaps metabolized these stages into something else entirely.

At 7:12 p.m. — the same temporal coordinate as in the previous case — C says, “I think the outside light is still on,” and D responds, “Good, let it feel included,” which is not, strictly speaking, a logical reply but functions as the opening move in a brief, improvised routine about the emotional lives of household fixtures that will, over the next two minutes, involve callbacks, mild absurdism and at least one moment where both are laughing too hard to continue.

This is what they do. Not constantly — there are dishes to wash, medications to remember, the low-level bureaucracies of aging to navigate — but persistently enough that the atmosphere of their shared life feels qualitatively different, as though the air itself has been infused with a mild, non-toxic form of play. It’s not that their jokes would strike anyone else as particularly witty or amusing. But that’s precisely what makes them so funny to the two principal parties here.

C and D put one in mind of Kurt Vonnegut’s way with neologisms, though not, I’m sorry to say, with his own sometimes messy domestic affairs. As the mid-20th century’s Mark Twain, Vonnegut could be a glum and grumpy old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls. Just like the original (except for the Pall Malls).

In Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, a “duprass” is defined within the fictional religion of Bokononism as a special sort of “karass” (a karass being a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner). A duprass comprises two and only two people. 

As laid out in the novel’s “Books of Bokonon,” the religion’s central holy text, a duprass has the following characteristics: 

• Intimacy and Focus: A duprass is a loving couple whose lives focus almost entirely on each other, often working together for a great purpose.

• Exclusivity: A true duprass cannot be “invaded,” not even by children born of such a union.

• Predictable End: Members of a duprass almost always die within a week of each other.

Essentially, a duprass is a version of what Vonnegut had referred to in an under-appreciated earlier novel, Mother Night, as a “nation of two.” We all know couples like this, so totally engrossed in, with and by each other that — to paraphrase the late, great Ben E. King (along with co-writers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller) — if the sky that we look upon should tumble and fall, or the mountain should crumble to the sea, they won’t cry, they won’t cry, no, they won’t shed a tear, just as long as they stand, stand as “we.”

Over their shared decades, duprasses construct a shared cognitive ecosystem. References are layered. A remark made in 1989 can be invoked, without explanation, in 2026 and still land with precision. Their conversations have the density of something long-cultivated; there are pathways and shortcuts that no outsider could easily map.

To observe them is to witness a kind of ongoing, collaborative authorship, each contributing to a text that is never finalized but continuously revised. When C mentions “the obsequious banker in that show with the swimming pool,” D is the only person on the planet who can come up with the name C was reaching for.

(For the record, Raymond Bailey played Milton Drysdale on The Beverly Hillbillies. And it wasn’t so much a swimming pool as a ceee-ment pond, as C reminds D. And then on to Sam Drucker.)

Conflicts sometimes arise; our lovebirds are not fictional. D has, on more than one occasion, accused C of “rearranging the dishwasher in a way that suggests hostility toward basic geometry.” C has countered with critiques of D’s tendency to “begin stories at a point approximately 12 minutes before relevance.”

These disagreements are not suppressed. They are engaged, sometimes with irritation, sometimes with surprising sharpness.

But — and this is the key structural difference — they do not accumulate. There is no sedimentary layer of unresolved grievances. Issues are processed in something closer to real time, metabolized through a combination of directness, humour and an underlying assumption that the other person is, fundamentally, on one’s side. The relationship is not a fragile equilibrium to be preserved at all costs, but a dynamic system capable of absorbing shocks without collapsing.

As Joan Didion admitted in a prophetic piece in the National Review in 1963 just before wedding fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, “Marriage seemed to me a risk venture, shadowy with shoals, uncharted sinkholes, possibilities for salvation and possibilities for insomnia, in-sickness-and-in-health-and-you-had-better-count on-the-sickness.” All couples in for the long haul experience all of this. But C and D make it work. “It takes two people who are willing to put in the time,” Didion would tell journalist Sara Davidson years later.

The children of C and D call on Sundays as well. These calls are less like panel discussions and more like improvisational radio shows. C and D occasionally talk over each other, not out of disregard but out of shared enthusiasm. They ask questions — actual questions, with unpredictable answers — and listen to the responses with visible interest.

After the call, they often continue discussing something that emerged from it, spinning it outward into speculation, memory or mild philosophical inquiry.

There might be a moment, after one such call, when D says, “Do you ever think about how strange it is that we ended up with this exact set of people?” and C says, “All the time,” and what follows is not a shutdown of the topic but an expansion — into contingency, into chance, into the peculiar, improbable sequence of events that led to this particular configuration of lives.

If there is a box of artifacts in their hallway closet — and there almost certainly is — it is not a sealed archive but an active resource, periodically revisited, reinterpreted, integrated into the ongoing narrative. The past is not a museum; it is a toolkit.

At night, they also watch television. But the watching is porous. Commentary flows in both directions. A scene triggers a memory; a line of dialogue becomes a springboard for a tangent; a commercial is dissected with a level of attention it almost certainly does not deserve. The screen is not a barrier but a shared object of engagement.

And here, too, is an absurd detail, though of a different flavour: if you were to ask either C or D whether they are “happy,” they might hesitate — not because the answer is no, but because the question itself feels insufficiently precise. What they have is not a constant emotional high but a sustained sense of vitality (or at least sentience) within the relationship, a feeling that the other person remains, even after half a century, an inexhaustible source of joy and novelty.

“What I came to love later was different from what I loved in the beginning,” Didion wrote in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, a couple of years after Dunne, her partner of 40 years, had suffered a fatal heart attack in their Manhattan apartment on the second-last day of 2003. “Later we had so much history, we had a life together and we were the only people in it.”

Coda: On Trajectories and Tiny Decisions

Placed side by side (like the egg rolls being scraped stealthily into Tupperware containers hidden under the buffet table while the head waiter is temporarily distracted), these case studies risk creating the impression of a moral binary — as though one path represents failure and the other success, and all that is required is the correct sequence of choices.

This is, of course, an oversimplification of a system so complex that it routinely defeats the predictive capacities of entire academic fields.

And yet.

Both A/B and C/D began, in all likelihood, with comparable initial conditions: attraction, intention, the vague but sincere belief that they were entering into something meaningful. The divergence did not occur in a single, dramatic moment but in the accumulation of small decisions — whether to ask a follow-up question, whether to articulate a minor irritation before it calcifies, whether to treat the other person as a finished product or an ongoing process.

The difference, in other words, is not located in grand gestures but in micro-behaviours so subtle they are almost invisible while they are happening.

Perhaps this is the most unsettling conclusion available: that the long-term fate of a relationship may hinge less on compatibility in the abstract than on the repeated choice, made under conditions of fatigue, distraction and the general entropy of adult life, to remain at least minimally curious about the person sitting across the table asking whether the outside light is on — and, crucially, to care about the answer.

These are not fixed categories but trajectories. The Silently Divorced were not always so; Rob and Laura Petrie, Nick and Nora Charles (imagine all four as simpatico seniors) did not emerge fully formed as late-career Spencer Tracys and Katharine Hepburns, finishing each other’s sentences. Each represents the cumulative result of countless tiny decisions, omissions, attentions and avoidances, accreting over time into something that eventually feels inevitable.

It gives one pause that somewhere, right now, in a kitchen or a car or back in that self-same grocery store aisle, a couple is making what appears to be an insignificant choice — to ask one more question, to let one more silence pass — and in doing so is, in some infinitesimal but real way, drifting toward one outcome or the other: the long, quiet plateau of parallel lives, or the strange, improbable orbit of two people who, against most statistical expectations, continue to find each other interesting.

Until death do them part. And — who knows? — maybe even after.