1) Learn to communicate – talk, talk, talk!
2) Get to know your partner well before marrying
3) Treat marriage as an unbreakable lifelong commitment – stay when it’s bad because you can come out with a fulfilling intact marriage
4) Learn to work as a team – treat problems as community property
5) Choose a partner that is similar to you – especially core values like parenting, money and religion
This comes from Cornell gerontologist Karl Pillemer and is the largest in depth study done about long term unions. This random national survey of spanned almost 400 Americans age 65 or older with relationships lasting 30-76 years, ok people, that’s 40,000 hours of experience.