"This is great, what do you call this?" "Soup," comes the quietly delighted reply. A simple thank you might well suffice but its absence is unfortunately common.
We easily make a fuss about the rarity of some victory, forgetting to celebrate the simple heroism of the ordinary.
The Time article mostly focuses on ways to avoid splitting up and finally admits that no one has the answer to how to stay married.
Since people can and do stay in unhappy marriages for a variety of reasons, the real question is how to stay happily married. That turns out to be unique to each couple.
Tolstoy's famous aphorism in Anna Karenina should be turned on its head. All happy marriages, he says, are alike, unhappy marriages are different and that makes them interesting.
Much more true is the unique way each long-married and happy couple have resolved two essential problems - familiarity and conflict. It's familiarity that breeds the contempt the article warns against.
There is some research into factors that long-time happily married couples considered key. One big factor was a sense of humour. Right after that came a continued sense of each other as mystery, and a willingness to turn deaf and blind to most provocation. But most interesting was their manner of dealing with conflict.
Conflict is inevitable in marriage, yet for most couples it's unanticipated and hence not prepared for. Getting married - and what used to be called in quaint times, courtship - is the easy part. It's mostly about two people getting together to do fun things. Conflict, quarrelling was an uninvited third party, mostly avoided, quickly disposed of.
Yet the best indicator for future success in marriage is ability to manage conflict.
While this column doesn't pretend to know the answers, it is possible to work out simple rules - rules designed to make the avoided become constructive.
Rules should be agreed upon, like having a finite time for an argument or limiting the argument to one subject. Or being clear about what's not to happen, like anything remotely physical, or one party leaving in the middle.
One of the best set of rules for managing conflict came from a programme teaching negotiating skills to teenagers. You can't call names. You can't interrupt. And you have to want to solve the problem.
Expressed differently, respect the integrity of the other. Listen to each other, and work toward a solution, not toward winning. That last is key because there should be no one winner to an argument between intimates. It's designed for both to learn something and grow.
In turn, that means an argument ends when it ends and no one keeps score.
It turns out that conflict resolution is the glue that helps maintain both intimacy and mystery because nothing brings out more completely the elements of character and who we are, and nothing better exemplifies how different and unknowable we remain to each other.
*Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
