Wednesday, January 8th

It's our Wedding Anniversary today - 54 years since we walked down the aisle of St Alban's Church in Corrimal in front of family and friends.  As they say in the classics, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then.  (More details in my memoir 'Never Lost.')

I wondered just how common it is for people to reach their 54th anniversary and found there is all sorts of information on the Internet, but it depends what question you ask.  For example, Marilyn and I are members of an exclusive group of 6% or just one more pair in a mob of 50%.

I though I would rather be in the 6%, and found that that ratio applied to the question 'how many married people have been together more than 50 years?  But of course, in that situation, we're being compared with people who've been married for 49 years, those who've been married 1 day, and everyone in-between.  In fact, 6% seems quite a lot.

In the other scenario, the question is, 'how many people who married in 1966 are still married?' And the perhaps surprising answer is 49.8%.  All the other are divorced, separated, widowed or dead!  All things being equal, I think I'll stick with the second scenario.

There's probably a generational factor at work here.  Looking at our cohort of friends who married at around the same time as we did, we can think of just three couples who eventually split.  We're told now that, today, 1 in 3 marriages end in divorce, even though people stay together for around 12 years before ending it.  Our generation can certainly beat that:  maybe 1 in 10 failed, although who can tell what's around the corner.