First Dates and Fifty Years

Who should pay on the first date?

People spend an enormous amount of time arguing about whether the man should pay, whether the bill should be split, or whether one person owes the other something because they paid for dinner.

I’ve listened to people discuss this with a level of seriousness that I’d ordinarily associate with negotiating a peace treaty.

But why are two people going on a date in the first place?

Presumably, it’s because they want to spend time together. They find one another interesting or attractive, and they’d like an opportunity to get to know each other.

That’s the purpose of the date.

Once you’ve established that, the question becomes how to make it happen.

Maybe one person pays for dinner. Maybe they split the bill. Maybe neither has enough money for dinner, so they go for a walk in the park.

The details aren’t particularly important. What’s important is that they want to spend time together and find a way to achieve that purpose.

And if someone has to promise another person dinner, money, or some other benefit just to convince them to show up, perhaps they shouldn’t be going on that date in the first place.

When we’re young, we make the biggest decisions of our lives before we realize how big those decisions are.

We choose careers. We go to college, or don’t. We decide where we’re going to live. We fall in love, get married, and sometimes have children. We make commitments that will shape the next twenty, thirty, or fifty years of our lives, often before we’ve lived long enough to appreciate what those commitments mean.

How do two people keep a promise for fifty years when neither can know what those years will bring?

That’s just part of being young. You make decisions based on what you know, what you want, and what you believe your future is going to look like. Then you spend much of the rest of your life discovering what those decisions mean.

I was twenty-three when I married my wife. Next March, we’ll celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I wonder now why I thought it was a good idea to be married in the wintertime, but I’ve forgotten.

Last year, I sat down and calculated the date when I would have spent more days of my life married than unmarried. That number was 8,663. I crossed that threshold last December. My wife crossed it this year.

Not a milestone I hear often. Not everyone feels the urge to do random math problems. Nevertheless, we’ve each spent more of our lives married than unmarried. At twenty-three, I couldn’t have imagined what that would mean.

When I was young, I occasionally attended someone’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. I remember thinking two things. First, those people were really old. And second, someday, if I got married, I’d probably have a fiftieth wedding anniversary of my own.

I didn’t think there was anything particularly unusual about reaching fifty years of marriage. You got married, stayed married, and eventually somebody brought you a cake. That’s how I understood it.

It hadn’t occurred to me that both people also had to live long enough to eat the cake.

Of course, when you’re young, you don’t realize how much your life can change in fifty years, how much two people might change, or how fortunate they’d have to be simply to have that much time together.

And recently, I became interested in just how fortunate those couples are.

PAIGE

In 2011, the United States Census Bureau reported that only about six percent of married American couples had reached their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Thirty-five percent had reached twenty-five years.

Six percent. That’s a remarkably small number. That doesn’t mean only six percent of marriages will ever reach fifty years, that survey was a snapshot in time.

But there’s another interesting statistic. In November 1980, the National Center for Health Statistics published a study examining how long American marriages would last.

Using divorce and mortality rates from 1975, researchers estimated that among first marriages reaching their twenty-fifth anniversary, about one-third would survive to their fiftieth.

Two-thirds wouldn’t.

Now, those estimates reflected the conditions of the 1970s. Americans are living longer today, and improvements in life expectancy have increased the opportunity for couples to spend more years together.

The point. Even after twenty-five years of marriage, reaching fifty depends on more than a couple’s willingness to remain married.

It also depends on how much time they have.

JOEL

There are really two fundamental obstacles to celebrating a fiftieth wedding anniversary. Divorce and mortality.

The first is something we have at least some influence over. The second, considerably less.

If two people marry at twenty-five, they both have to live to seventy-five to celebrate fifty years. If they marry at thirty-five, they both have to live to eighty-five.

They can have a wonderful marriage. Neither may ever consider divorce. They can remain completely committed to one another for the rest of their lives.

And still never celebrate fifty years.

That’s something I didn’t appreciate when I was young. I saw a fiftieth wedding anniversary as a measure of commitment. And it is. But it’s also a measure of good fortune.

Now, as I approach fifty years old myself in a couple years, I’m increasingly conscious of how quickly time passes.

I remember my short time as a squadron commander. I was thirty-nine years old, and one of my responsibilities was meeting the young airmen arriving in the squadron. We’d talk about the squadron, our standards, what I expected of them, and what they could expect from the organization.

Most of these young airmen were eighteen or nineteen years old. Some hadn’t been born when I’d entered military service.

And I remember sitting across from them and thinking about the difference in our ages.

I’d already lived two of their lifetimes.

And the strange thing was, I didn’t feel particularly old.

I could still remember being their age, joining the military, and wondering what the future would hold. I remembered being the young officer arriving at a new unit. It didn’t seem like all that long ago.

But apparently, the calendar had a different opinion.

To those young airmen, I was the grizzled squadron commander. To me, it seemed like I’d been sitting on their side of the desk just a few years earlier.

And I think that’s one of the peculiar things about getting older.

Thirty-nine years seems like an eternity when you’re eighteen. But when you’re thirty-nine, those years don’t feel nearly as long as you’d imagined they would.

I’m discovering that twenty-five years of marriage works much the same way.

We experience life one day at a time. We get up, go to work, take care of our families, and do whatever needs to be done. We make dinner, pay bills, go to bed, and do it again tomorrow.

Then one day you sit down and realize you’ve spent more of your life married than unmarried.

And somehow, all those days have become twenty-five years.

Which has led me to think about something else.

When I consider how much life can change over twenty-five or fifty years, I find myself wondering why so much of our conversation about marriage seems concerned with details and arrangements that may not survive even the first few years.

PAIGE

There’s certainly no shortage of opinions about what men and women owe one another.

Social media is full of arguments about who should pay for the first date, whether married couples should combine their finances, how much each person should contribute to household expenses, and how responsibilities should be divided.

And these aren’t meaningless questions. Financial independence matters. Unpaid household work has value. An arrangement that appears equal on paper may place a much greater burden on one person than the other.

But much of the debate focuses on what each person should receive from a relationship, rather than what the two people hope to achieve together.

It’s a distinction between negotiating individual obligations and deciding on a common purpose.

JOEL

Let’s go back to the first date.

Go to a coffee shop. On a walk in the tall weeds on a hot summer night. A motorcycle ride. Play pool. Stop in randomly at midnight at their house, thinking nothing of the hour.

Are these dates? Who cares!

I’ll say again, if someone has to bribe someone else with dinner, money, or some other benefit just to convince them to show up, maybe they shouldn’t be going on that date in the first place.

I think something similar happens when people get married.

Some may say the details of what someone owes someone else are the most important part of a marriage.

I say, do not marry those people.

My wife and I have always combined our finances. When we married, we had one household, one set of bills, and one shared future.

We didn’t approach our finances by calculating which expenses belonged to which person. We were building a life together. The money was there to support that life.

During my military career, we moved frequently. For about ten years, we moved every year or two. There were periods when my career largely determined where we lived and what our family could do.

A tough arrangement when your wife loves to work and is independent.

When our children were young, we were fortunate that she could spend time at home with them. That’s an opportunity I’m grateful our family had.

But that also meant we weren’t contributing to the household in the same ways.

And why would we expect to?

We were doing different things because our family needed different things from each of us.

If we’d approached our marriage as two individuals continuously calculating what one owed the other, I’m not sure how we would have accounted for all of that.

How do you calculate the financial value of staying home with your children? How do you account for a career opportunity one person gives up so the other can pursue something? What about the years when one spouse earns more, or works longer hours, or takes on more responsibilities at home?

You can try to assign a value to all of those things. And sometimes, for practical reasons, you have to.

But keeping an accurate ledger is not the same thing as building a successful marriage.

Now, I’m not suggesting every married couple needs a joint bank account. There are plenty of perfectly reasonable ways to organize a household. My cousin once sold his wife his used car! What works for my wife and me may not work for someone else.

But there’s a fundamental difference between approaching marriage as two individuals negotiating their respective obligations and approaching it as two people committed to a shared purpose.

And that difference becomes more important as the years pass.

Because your circumstances change.

You have children. Your careers change. You move. You become ill. Your parents get older. Sometimes one person can contribute more in one area while the other contributes more somewhere else.

The arrangement that made perfect sense when you were twenty-five may make absolutely no sense when you’re forty-five or sixty-five.

And if maintaining that arrangement has become your objective, then every change in circumstances becomes a problem.

But if the arrangement exists to support a larger purpose, you can change the arrangement without abandoning what you were trying to achieve.

That’s a distinction I came to appreciate during my military career, and it reminds me of the work of Air Force Colonel John Boyd.

PAIGE

John Boyd was an American fighter pilot and military strategist whose ideas influenced modern military thinking.

He’s probably best known for the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

It’s frequently described as a process for making decisions more quickly than an adversary. You observe what’s happening, orient yourself to the circumstances, decide what to do, and act. Then you repeat the process as new information becomes available.

The popular interpretation is that whoever moves through the loop faster gains an advantage.

But that misses the decisive part of Boyd’s thinking.

Orientation isn’t simply another step in a sequence. It’s the process through which we interpret the world around us. Our experience, assumptions, knowledge, and expectations all influence how we understand the circumstances we’re facing.

Think of orientation like it’s the way you’re facing. You can make the fastest decisions in the world and still not see what’s happening real time if you’re looking the other way.

And if our understanding is wrong, making decisions more quickly doesn’t necessarily help. You just make the wrong decision sooner.

JOEL

So. First dates and fifty years.

When you’re young, you make the most important decisions of your life, without having the wisdom of time to know how important they are.

And there’s a great equalizer in life. Time and chance happen to us all.

When I was young, I thought a fiftieth wedding anniversary was simply what happened if you stayed married long enough. But when you’re young, you don’t realize how much your life can change in fifty years, how much two people might change, or how fortunate they’d have to be simply to have that much time together.

Next March, my wife and I will celebrate twenty-five years. Our first date? I have no idea what it was. That summer, we met in a coffee shop. Went on a motorcycle ride. Got bit by chiggers in the tall grass. Drifted down a river in a canoe. I’m not sure we even went on a formal date.

I’m not halfway to some guaranteed destination. I have no idea what the next twenty-five years will bring or whether we’ll be fortunate enough to have them.

I’m not offering anyone a lesson on how to have a successful marriage. I’ve only been married for almost twenty-five years, and I wouldn’t pretend to know everything there is to know about it.

But I do wonder if we’ve begun asking the wrong questions.

We spend an extraordinary amount of time debating what one person owes another, when maybe we ought to begin by considering what two people want to achieve together.

The details will change. What we are trying to preserve is the life we are building together.

Maybe that’s a different way of thinking about marriage.

Sources

The percentage of currently married American couples who had reached their 25th anniversary (35%) or 50th anniversary (6%), reported in 2011 using 2009 survey data: U.S. Census Bureau, “Census Bureau Reports 55 Percent Have Married One Time”.

The 1980 federal study estimating that approximately one-third of first marriages reaching their 25th anniversary would survive to their 50th, based on 1975 divorce and mortality rates. The findings appear on page 10: James A. Weed, National Center for Health Statistics, National Estimates of Marriage Dissolution and Survivorship: United States (1980).

Historical improvements in American life expectancy, including changes in remaining life expectancy at age 65 since 1975: Social Security Administration, “Period Life Expectancy,” 2024 Trustees Report, Table V.A4.

Current American life expectancy, including 2024 life expectancy of 79.0 years at birth and remaining life expectancy at age 65 of 18.4 years for men and 20.8 years for women: CDC National Center for Health Statistics, “Mortality in the United States, 2024,” Data Brief No. 548 (January 2026).

Colonel John Boyd’s original explanation of the OODA loop, particularly how orientation shapes observation, decisions, and actions, and how experience, cultural traditions, new information, and analysis influence orientation: John R. Boyd, The Essence of Winning and Losing (1996), edited edition by Chet Richards and Chuck Spinney.

The deeper interpretation of Boyd’s strategic theory, including why reducing the OODA loop to decision-making speed overlooks the importance of orientation, learning, and adaptation: Frans P. B. Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (Routledge, 2007).

The economic value of unpaid household labor, including raising children, caregiving, and maintaining a household. The Government Accountability Office estimated that unpaid household work contributed at least $5.6 trillion in economic value in 2024: U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Unpaid Household Work: Estimated Value and Time Spent on Domestic Tasks and Caregiving” (September 17, 2026).

Human outcomes are influenced by circumstances beyond individual control, expressed as “time and chance happen to them all”: Ecclesiastes 9:11, New International Version, via Bible Gateway.

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