Bonnie and I have been married for fifty-four years, together for almost fifty-six. Like most couples who stay together that long, we’ve had our share of both mountains and valleys. What carried us through both was never a mystery to us — it was our faith, and our stubborn commitment to each other. But there’s something else long marriages don’t like to admit out loud: even a good one can go quiet. Not broken. Just… routine. Familiar to the point of invisible.
That’s the part nobody warns you about when you’re young and newly married. You brace yourself for the big crises — illness, loss, hard years — and you build your marriage strong enough to survive them. What you don’t expect is that the greater threat, over fifty years, might simply be sameness. The same conversations at the same hour. The same unspoken assumption that you already know everything worth knowing about the person across the table from you. It isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It just accumulates, year over year, until two people who love each other deeply have quietly stopped looking at each other closely.
About twenty years ago, we noticed it happening to us, and we did something about it. We attended a marriage retreat that asked us to write to each other — actual letters, about our thoughts, our hopes, our dreams for the years ahead. It worked. For a while, it truly did. We felt like ourselves again, the selves who had once read to each other from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet at our small 1972 wedding in Bonnie’s mother’s house in Red Lodge, Montana, during a blizzard. But routine is patient. A few years later, without either of us quite noticing the slide, we had drifted back into it. That’s the thing about the drift — it never asks permission. It just resumes. We didn’t know it then, but we were exactly the kind of couple who eventually has to find a way to rekindle a marriage after years of routine — we just didn’t know yet what would force the issue.
Then came March 2020.
Bonnie’s employer, Cascia Hall Preparatory School, closed its campus and moved everything online for the rest of the school year. We chose to shelter in place, as so many were being urged to do. For me, the disruption was modest — I was already working from home in my real estate career. For Bonnie, her entire professional world turned upside down overnight. Suddenly we were two people who’d spent decades on separate rhythms, now sharing our 1,440 square feet on the nineteenth floor, twenty-four hours a day, with nowhere else to be — a home that had, ever since we moved downtown, already quietly become our sanctuary. It was about to become that in a deeper sense than we knew.
I won’t pretend we saw it coming, but that forced proximity turned out to be the best thing that happened to our marriage in a decade.
The researchers who study long-term relationships have a name for what happens to people when a crisis strips away the ordinary distractions of life: it sharpens what matters. When time suddenly feels finite — and a pandemic has a way of making that feeling unavoidable — people instinctively stop chasing the open-ended and start reaching for whatever is emotionally meaningful right in front of them. For us, that meant each other.
Suddenly we were two people who’d spent decades on separate rhythms, sharing 1,440 square feet, twenty-four hours a day, with nowhere else to be.
We didn’t have a plan. We just sat together and talked — really talked, the way we hadn’t in a long time. We renewed our vows to each other, right there in our living room. We pulled The Prophet off the shelf for the first time in years and began reading it aloud again, just as we had in that blizzard fifty-plus years earlier. We settled into Sundays as our date night: an evening that started with Gibran’s words read aloud between us and ended, at bedtime, with New Age ambient music playing softly in the background. It became a ritual we looked forward to all week — the first time in decades either of us had felt that particular kind of anticipation about our own marriage.
What strikes me now, looking back, is how modest the ritual actually was. There was no grand gesture in any of it — no trip, no elaborate plan, nothing that required money or a special occasion. Just an hour of undivided attention once a week, offered on purpose. I’ve come to believe that’s precisely why it worked. Grand gestures are easy to admire and hard to sustain. A small, repeatable act of attention is the opposite — unremarkable to describe, but durable enough to become the architecture of an entire marriage.
It wasn’t even the first small ritual of devotion in our marriage — I’d already found one language for it years earlier, in cooking her dinner most nights of the week. Covid simply gave us a second one, and then a third.
What’s interesting, looking back with a bit of research in hand, is that none of this was guaranteed to go the way it did. Studies of couples during lockdown found something researchers call a split: the pandemic didn’t create marital strength or marital strain out of nothing — it amplified whatever was already there. Couples with a foundation of real trust often found that enforced togetherness deepened their bond in a way researchers describe almost neurologically: something like an “immobility without fear,” where the nervous system, instead of treating a partner’s constant presence as a threat, settles into it as safety. Couples without that foundation, on the other hand, often found the same forced proximity intensified whatever distance or resentment was already quietly present.
We were fortunate. Fifty years of trust, and — more than anything else — a shared faith, gave us the foundation the crisis needed to work with rather than against. I don’t think I’m overstating it when I say the faith part was the actual engine of everything else. The vow renewal, the reading, the music, the long talks — none of it would have held together the way it did without that deeper belief we shared that our marriage was something sacred, worth protecting, worth rebuilding. The other pieces were the expression of that. Faith was the foundation underneath them.
There’s also something to be said for simple novelty inside a long routine. Psychologists have long observed that couples who deliberately introduce new, shared experiences into a stagnant relationship reactivate parts of the brain associated with the excitement of early love — the same reward pathways, reawakened by something as small as a new ritual. Reading The Prophet again wasn’t new to us; but the ritual around it — Sunday evenings, uninterrupted, chosen rather than assumed — was. It gave a decades-old marriage the emotional texture of something being discovered for the first time.
It gave a decades-old marriage the emotional texture of something being discovered for the first time.
What changed for us wasn’t dramatic in the way pandemic stories often are. There was no single turning point, no one Tuesday when everything shifted. It was gradual — weeks, then months — a collection of small moments that, added together, amounted to something we couldn’t have manufactured if we’d tried. For the first time in years, we actually saw each other again. Not the shorthand version of each other that decades of routine tends to produce, but the whole person, the one we’d fallen in love with in Montana in a blizzard all those years ago.
I think about that word — seeing — a great deal now. It’s such an ordinary verb for something so rare. After enough years together, most couples don’t stop loving each other; they simply stop looking. You learn your spouse’s habits so thoroughly that you quit noticing the person underneath them. What Covid did, oddly, was force us to stop and look again — not because we chose to at first, but because there was, for once, nowhere else to direct our attention.
I won’t say Covid saved our marriage. I don’t think it needed saving in any dramatic sense — it needed attention, the kind that fifty years of habit quietly steals from even the best relationships. What the pandemic gave us was something we hadn’t had in years: unbroken time, and the willingness to use it well.
It’s been six years now. Bonnie’s world went back to normal not long after that first pandemic spring — the campus reopened, the routines of ordinary life resumed. But Sunday nights didn’t go back to normal. We still read to each other. We still let the ambient music carry us into sleep. We still choose, every week, to see each other, rather than simply live alongside each other. That choice, more than any crisis, turned out to be the real gift — and the plainest proof I know that a marriage doesn’t need a crisis to be renewed. It only needs two people willing to keep choosing each other, on purpose, week after week, for as long as they’re given. If our story proves anything, it’s that you can rekindle a marriage after years of routine without ever needing a crisis to force the issue — though in our case, one did.
