Rita Wilson Calls Tom Hanks 'The Love Of My Life' At 70: What A 38-Year Marriage Actually Requires, From A Couples Therapist
Tom Hanks turned 70 this week. His wife of 38 years, Rita Wilson, posted a snapshot of him grinning under a bushy white beard and sunglasses, and called him "the love of my life." According to a recent Daily Mail piece, the post landed just weeks after they marked their 38th anniversary, and the internet did what the internet does with these stories. It cooed. It called them goals. It scrolled on.
I want to slow the scroll.
Because when a couple hits 38 years and one of them still uses the phrase "love of my life" in public, without irony, without a wink, without hedging, my clinical ear picks something up. That is not the sound of a fairytale. That is the sound of two nervous systems that have been through something. Repeatedly. And found their way back.
I do not know Tom Hanks or Rita Wilson. I will not pretend to. I have never sat with them in my office. What I do know, after sixteen years of doing couples work with over three thousand pairs in San Francisco, is that nobody arrives at year 38 by accident. Nobody drifts there on chemistry. The couples I see who make it that far all share something, and it is not compatibility. It is the willingness to repair.
That is the angle worth taking here. Not "aww, they still love each other." The real story is what a long marriage actually costs, and what it actually is when you look at it clinically.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
The Spark Was Never The Relationship
Here is the first thing I want to say, because it is the myth that quietly ends more marriages than infidelity does.
Desire does not die in long-term relationships. It gets buried under safety.
When a relationship first forms, everything is uncertain. Your body does not know if this person will stay, will call back, will choose you. That uncertainty activates the survival brain. Your heart races. Your appetite disappears. You cannot sleep. Society has a name for this state. We call it passion. We call it chemistry. We call it magic.
It is none of those things. It is your physiology on high alert because it cannot yet predict the outcome. That is all.
As the bond stabilizes, the uncertainty drops. Your body starts to trust that this person is not going anywhere. The fireworks quiet down and become something that feels closer to a warm blanket. Most people, at this point, panic. They say, "we lost the spark." They start reading articles about how to rekindle it. They plan getaways. They buy lingerie. They resent their partner for not being new anymore.
But the spark was never the relationship. The spark was the uncertainty. And the couples I see at year 38 with something real between them did not chase novelty. They took a different risk. The risk of being fully known by someone who already knows them. The risk of showing the parts of themselves they had been hiding, even from the person sleeping next to them.
That is the erotic charge available in a long marriage. It is not the same charge as year one. It is more dangerous. Because in year one, your partner does not know you well enough to really wound you. By year 38, they do. And showing up anyway is the actual work.
I have written more about this specific dynamic in what secure functioning in relationships actually looks like, because the myth of the spark is one of the most damaging stories our culture tells couples.
Disconnection Is A Feature, Not A Bug
The second thing I want to say is the one that most couples never quite accept, even when their therapist tells them out loud.
If you love each other, you are going to scare the living daylights out of each other over and over again for the rest of your life.
That is not a failure of the relationship. That is the relationship. A good bond goes from good to bad, and from bad back to good, and then back to bad, and back to good again, on repeat, for decades. Your job is not to eliminate the disconnection. Your job is to get better and better at finding your way home from it.
Good relationships are not defined by the amount of good times two people have together. They are defined by how good each partner is at giving themselves, and each other, the chance to repair.
That is the whole secret. It is not glamorous. It does not make for a good Instagram caption. It is not what Rita Wilson said in her post, because nobody says "38 years of relentless emotional repair" on a birthday tribute. But that is what a 38-year marriage actually is.
Underneath every argument two people have, no matter how long they have been together, are the same two questions the body is always asking. Am I a priority to you. Am I too much or not enough. Those questions do not age out. A 70-year-old body asks them with the same intensity as a two-year-old body does. Nothing has changed except who the primary bond is with.
When the answer to those questions feels temporarily like "no," the survival brain fires. The rational part of the brain runs behind the survival part. And two people who genuinely love each other suddenly cannot access their own capacity to be kind. That is not because they are bad partners. That is because they are mammals with attachment systems that were built long before language.
The Waltz Two People Do Together
Every long-term couple I have ever worked with is doing some version of the same dance. In my published work I call it the Waltz of Pain, and it goes like this. Your protector meets your partner's protector. Their protector meets yours. Two childhood strategies collide, and the relationship becomes a reenactment of wounds neither partner caused.
One partner tends to reach when connection feels at risk. I call this the Relentless Lover. Their body says, please do not leave me. Please see me. Please let me matter. They protest for closeness, often loudly, sometimes sharply, because the alternative feels like disappearing.
The other partner tends to retreat when things feel intense. I call this the Reluctant Lover. Their body says, please do not see my flaws. Please do not expose my not-enoughness. Please do not reject me. They protect through distance, going quiet, going logical, going somewhere else in their head.
Both are loyal protector parts. Both kept you alive as a child. But protecting is not the same as connecting. And in a long marriage, if you do not learn to see the waltz you and your partner are doing together, you will do it for forty years and blame each other for the choreography.
The couples who make it to year 38 with something real between them have usually, at some point, zoomed out far enough to see the dance. Not to blame themselves for it. Not to blame each other. Just to see it. That single act of seeing, of noticing what the two of you do to each other when you are scared, changes the whole thing.
If you want to name your pattern first, you can take the free Figs Quiz.
What Fights Are Actually About
I worked with a couple last year who had been married for 34 years. They came in fighting about the dishwasher. The way he loaded it. The way she reloaded it after he loaded it. Whether the plates went on the top or the bottom. Whether she was being controlling or he was being lazy.
The topic was not the issue. The way they were talking about the topic emotionally was the issue. Because underneath the dishwasher fight was the exact same fight they had been having for three and a half decades. It was always the same argument. They were just distracted by the content.
Couples fight about the dishes instead of abandonment. They fight about tone instead of shame. They fight about timing instead of fear. They fight about the dishwasher because the dishwasher is easier than saying, "I have felt invisible to you for a long time, and I do not know how to ask you to see me without sounding pathetic."
That is what 38 years looks like from the inside. It looks like couples who have finally gotten honest enough to stop fighting about the dishwasher and start saying what is actually happening in their bodies. It looks like Rita Wilson posting "love of my life" on a birthday, and both of them knowing what that phrase cost. All the times they got it wrong. All the times one of them turned away. All the times they had to find their way back.
I write about this specific dynamic more directly in when your wife talks to her ex behind your back, because the presenting problem is almost never the actual problem.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
The Sovereign Us
There is a place couples can get to, after enough repair, where the relationship itself becomes something both partners protect. I call it the Sovereign Us. It is the thing you build, not the thing you fall into.
Relational sovereignty says this. I am sovereign. You are sovereign. And the us between us is sovereign too. Not fused. Not collapsed. Not codependent. Not avoidant. A stable emotional system that can hold both people with both compassion and truth. A secure base built between two whole selves.
This is not a permanent state. It is a place you return to. You lose it. You come back. You lose it. You come back. That is the practice. Nobody stays there. The couples I see who have been together for four decades have not achieved some final enlightened plateau. They have gotten faster at coming back.
That is what I would say a 38-year marriage actually is. It is thousands of small returns. Thousands of moments where one of them turned toward the other after having turned away. Thousands of times where somebody chose the bond over being right.
Nothing romantic about that description. And yet everything romantic about it, if you can see it.
Because the couples who protect the shared ground between them, over years, do not just keep a marriage. They give each other something almost nobody else in the world can give. The steady, mundane, reliable experience of being known and chosen anyway. Not just at year one, when there was nothing to know. At year 38, when there is everything to know. And still, chosen.
From The Screen To Your Living Room
You are probably not Tom Hanks. Your partner is probably not Rita Wilson. You do not have their money, their staff, their public life. You also do not have their years, if you are earlier in the arc. What you have is the same body every human being has, and the same two questions running underneath every conversation you have.
Am I a priority to you. Am I enough for you.
Whether you have been together three years or thirty-three, those questions are alive right now, in whatever room you are reading this in. And the small ways you and your partner have been answering them, mostly without noticing, are the actual architecture of your marriage. Not the vacations. Not the anniversaries. The daily answering.
If year 38 sounds impossible from where you are sitting, that is not because you are broken. That is because nobody handed you the actual map. You were given a spark story. Nobody told you the spark was the uncertainty. Nobody told you disconnection is a feature. Nobody told you the waltz you keep doing has a name and a shape and can be seen from above.
You can see it now. That is the beginning.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
Thirty-eight years is not a fairytale. It is thousands of returns. Which one are you willing to make today?
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