When he's in his workshop downstairs my husband uses his mini-laptop computer to tune in to the U.S. National Public Radio out of Boston, interested in their varied programming. At dinner last night, he told me about a program that he'd listened to, and which obviously moved him, for he sounded fairly disturbed, talking to me about what he'd listened in at.

The program focused on a kind of self-help group dedicated to giving encouragement and sympathy to people past middle-age who had been married for quite a considerable length of time and one or the other of the pair had declared their intention to leave the marriage. He had been moved by listening to the still-fresh wounds in the voices of women in particular who had evidently no idea that their spouse was no longer interested in maintaining their marriage. Who described the decision to leave as coming out of the blue, wounding them beyond their capacity to sustain themselves.

These were marriages that had lasted on average thirty-five years, when one partner had arrived at the decision that they could no longer be part of the marriage covenant, declaring their firm intention to separate, become single again. And not necessarily to find another, compatible partner. Just stating that they "can't take it any longer", for whatever the idiosyncratic reason.

Whereas I have a tendency to mentally shrug 'too bad', my husband seems to find such things beyond sad, and personally moving. I kid him that likely the women were fed up by having their speech interrupted by the husband's overbearing need to have his say. But he finds it no joking matter.

Just coincidentally I happened to be reading an article in the newspaper by a professor of psychology at Northwest University who had conducted a considerable amount of research on marital relations and more particularly the penchant for people to separate, leading to an overall statistic of 46% failures in marriage ending in divorce.

Interestingly and logically enough, there's a kind of consensus that has been reached by those involved in such research, that marriages stand and fall on the amount of time two committed people in a marriage spend with one another. That's the glue that binds, apart from having interests in common. "The average marriage today is weaker than the average marriage of yore, in terms of both satisfaction and divorce rate, but the best marriages today are much stronger, in terms of both satisfaction and personal well-being, than the best marriages of yore", according to Eli J. Finkel's conclusions.

The University of Missouri researcher Christine M. Proulx analyzed 14 longitudinal studies between 1979 and 2002 concerning martial quality and personal well-being. What came out of that analysis was the conviction that marital quality predicts better personal well-being that becomes stronger over time; the identified benefits or lack of, of good and mediocre marriages have widened over time.

A pair of articles published in the journal Psychological Inquiry saw the development of a new theory of marriage success, evidently. The major thesis of which is that people now have elevated expectations of marriage which can be achieved resulting in unprecedentedly high levels of marital quality - possible if those involved are capable of and willing to devote a good portion of time and energy within their marriage. Without that investment, marriages fall short of expectations, and fail.

No kidding. I think of myself as the limpet ferociously attached to the rock of my existence, my husband of 59 years of marriage. And counting.