Married for 50 years, these psychologists who study love share what they’ve learned to do — and not to do — to stay happy

Psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron pose for a photo in their home on February 6. (Laura Oliverio/CNN via CNN Newsource)

When Elaine Spaulding met Arthur Aron in class at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1960s, she was conflicted.

Both were studying social psychology. Elaine was in her final year of undergraduate coursework, and Arthur was just beginning his doctoral program.

With a torn T-shirt and long hair, Arthur was the teaching assistant for her class. “I thought he was quite interesting (and) exciting,” Elaine said. Still, she said that she didn’t like how he ran the class.

But when walking out after the last class, Elaine said, “He stops me and says, ‘I think I’m having some feelings for you.’”

They looked at each other and kissed, Arthur, 79, recalled recently with a smile.

“And we fell madly in love,” said Elaine, 80, remembering that kiss near Telegraph Avenue, the famous thoroughfare that symbolizes Berkeley. “It was very passionate. We have a lot of feelings about that. It was such a passionate time, Berkeley in the ‘60s. Everything was very intense.”

The two became a couple personally and professionally, psychologists who dedicated their lives studying relationships and love. It would be another 30 years before they would coauthor the 1997 study behind “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love.” That list of questions was popularized in a 2015 essay for The New York Times Modern Love column, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.”

The Arons will celebrate 50 years of marriage on February 13 among friends and family in Mexico City. And it’s the years they have spent together that can probably tell you as much about keeping the love alive as those questions.

Who needs a marriage licence?

After that first kiss, things between Elaine and Arthur moved quickly. They got lunch, began seeing each other consistently and, a few months later, moved in together. Shortly afterward, they headed to Canada so they could continue graduate school in Toronto, with the expectation that Arthur eventually would be drafted if they stayed in the United States.

As part of the rebellious spirit prevalent in the 1960s, they had never been keen on getting married. Before meeting each other, they had each been married to other people when they were 19. “That’s just a pretty dumb age to think you know what you’re doing,” Elaine said on reflection.

After admitting they had made mistakes in the past, neither wanted to go through marriage again.

“At Berkeley, we’d go around and say we were married. We just wouldn’t say that we were married to other people,” Elaine remembered with a laugh.

Don’t let marriage get in the way

It wasn’t until nearly a decade later that they began to rethink the idea when their 4-year-old son popped the question. “He came home one day, and he asked us what a bastard was,” Elaine said. “And we decided we’d better get married.”

After living together seven years and having a child, they finally got married in the mid-1970s. Arthur remembers receiving some sage words from his rabbi on his wedding day.

He said, “Don’t let getting married interfere with your relationship.”

More than five decades after first meeting, the Arons are still together, living in Northern California, doing research and including their personal experiences in lectures on relationships, especially regarding praise and conflict. In fact, Elaine shared that they nearly broke up a couple of times.

“I call it ‘dividing the furniture’ when you start trying to figure out how you’re going to live when you’re apart from each other,” she said, “but we really learned something.”

Take time to listen to each other

One big mistake they believe people make is not properly listening to one another, so they set up rules to follow during an argument.

“One person would talk for five minutes, and the other person would not interrupt, not say a word, just listen,” Elaine said. “You can take notes if you disagree, but you can’t say anything.”

Then the other person would get the same amount of time and allow for a rebuttal before they would table the discussion for 24 hours.

“What happens is you’re forced to see how much pain you’re causing the other person,” Elaine said. “When you face the pain you’re causing, then it really makes you think about what you’re doing and whether you want to keep doing it.”

Partners may also need to ask for outside help, they both said. At points throughout their marriage, Elaine has gone through hardships and seen a therapist. “It made her feel much better, and it made our relationship better,” Arthur said.

“It’s so tempting to leave,” Elaine said, “and I have friends who left their marriages in their 50s and 60s. Now, they wish they were married because, at a certain point, it’s really good to have a partner. But it has to be someone that you really respect and like (and) get along with.”

They still work and play together

It does help that their research keeps their relationship healthy.

They recently conducted a study demonstrating the relationship benefits of having close friends who are couples. “It sort of expands you. It makes you feel broader,” said Arthur, who has also investigated the relationship benefits of frequently exploring new and challenging activities with your partner.

In 2020, when the pandemic began, Elaine and Arthur hopped on a video call with another couple to ask each other their 36 questions.

“That was really good for us. We’re always looking for interesting new things to do,” said Arthur, adding that it doesn’t always have to be about work.

“We like being out in nature together and walking together,” he said. “We try to find different trails. And pretty much every summer we go to Europe (and) walk in new places in Europe, from village to village, for a week or two.”

They appreciate each other’s differences

Though Elaine and Arthur often share work and outside interests, they differ in personality and temperament.

“We don’t have any sense from the research that people are better off with the same type or better off with a different type, but both work,” Elaine said. “But they work differently. And to work when you (have) different temperaments requires a lot of appreciation of the other person.”

Elaine, whose research focuses on highly sensitive people, said she is the more sensitive person than Arthur. She’s also often the one to lead in decision-making.

“I tend to do that a little bit more than he does, and he respects me for it and appreciates it a lot,” Elaine said, noting she chooses which trails to hike. “I know what it’s like at a particular time of day, a particular time of year, how much shade there’ll be, how hot it’ll be, how muddy it’ll be. So, I make the decisions where we’re going to walk.”

Respect and admiration

Looking back, Elaine said she believes respect is more important than love in the long run.

“There are so many problems that happen in the length of a marriage,” she said.

And she has also learned so much from her husband, who she said is “absolutely the kindest person” she knows. “I really like kindness, I really do,” she said. “We both try hard to be really nice to each other, but it’s with lots of ‘please and thank you.’”

Years ago, Arthur proudly remembers, with a giddy smile, applying research to his relationship with Elaine that showed the value of celebrating a partner’s successes.

“We had recently submitted a paper on her work, on a highly sensitive person, to a very top journal that we thought only had a very modest chance of getting accepted there.”

The same day he read an article about supporting a partner’s successes, he got the letter back saying that the reviewers loved Elaine’s research paper. That evening, he surprised his wife with a handmade poster with the paper and good news on it.

“We had a great night,” he said, noting that while a healthy sex life is important to a relationship, he won’t share details.

As for Elaine, she deeply admires Arthur’s honesty and integrity. She grew up in a family where, she recounted, if a waitress or checkout cashier made a mistake in your favor, you didn’t say a word.

“You ran out and just laughed,” she said with a chuckle. But Art, as she calls her husband, taught her that “it’s better to have a clean conscience when you go to sleep at night than anything you can get from not being so honest.”

Back to those 36 questions

If you’re still looking to that now-famous questionnaire — used on first dates, in classrooms, at parties and corporate team-building events — to find love, know that it was never conceived with love in sight.

“We developed this procedure, which allowed us in about 45 minutes to get two randomly paired people to feel very strong closeness to each other,” Arthur said. “They didn’t necessarily fall in love — that wasn’t the goal. It was just to create a sense of closeness.

“At the end of the 45 minutes, they feel as close to the person they never really interacted with before as they do to the closest person in their life,” he said. “Now, that doesn’t necessarily last, but it makes a very intense effect.”

So, the questions may bring you closer to someone, but it takes more to sustain that connection.

Take Elaine and Arthur’s anniversary. Having a wedding anniversary the day before Valentine’s Day could be like having a birthday just before Christmas — the individual milestone could get lost in the holiday, or festivities could be merged for the sake of convenience.

But Elaine and Aron try to remain romantic and celebrate both their anniversary and Valentine’s Day separately. For their anniversary, Arthur typically makes homemade cards for Elaine, thanking her for the wonderful salads she prepares and appreciating her for the “saint she is” to him.

On Valentine’s Day, they typically go to dinner and maybe even take a hike that Elaine planned ahead of time.

For them it wasn’t so much 36 questions, but more than 50 years of living together, working together, appreciating each other and celebrating each other that led to a long-lasting love.

By Sofía Sanchez