A record not likely to be broken

“Marriage is not a noun; it’s a verb. It isn’t something you get. It’s something you do. It’s the way you love your partner every day.” — Barbara de Angelis

The recent death of former first lady Barbara Bush has generated much discussion, but one topic that didn’t get a lot of attention is the personal record she and her husband, George Herbert Walker Bush set. They had the longest presidential marriage at more than 73 years and three months. I doubt the record itself was much on any of the Bushes’ minds recently as they were grieving, but this one is likely to be broken. Coming up behind them is the couple of Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter who will have been married 73 years in July and will eclipse the Bushes record in October, should both survive.

Amazingly, no other presidential couple comes even close to these two. The next longest presidential marriage is Gerald and Betty Ford at 58 years and after that, you have to go back to John and Abigail Adams at 54 years. The Adams’ marriage may have set the bar for political partnerships.

Only four other presidential marriages lasted over half a century: Nixon, Truman, Reagan, and Eisenhower. The Reagan marriage is impressive in one sense; Reagan was the first president to enter office having been divorced and his marriage to Nancy was his second and it lasted for 52 years.

The longevity of the Bushes’ and Carters’ marriages is impressive and not likely to be repeated. Consider the current living contenders: The Clintons have been married for over 40 years, but both would likely have to live to a century to get close to the length of either of these. The younger Bush couple are in a similar situation, a 40 year marriage, but both are over 70.

As for the current presidential marriage, Donald Trump is on his third wife, having married Melania in only 2005. Should they remain together, he’d have to live into his 130s. His wife is younger than I am, but would still have to live past 110 to keep up with the Carters or Bushes.

The biggest thing likely to prevent a future couple from breaking the record is that the age at which people get married is increasing. According to census data, the median age at first marriage in the US was at its lowest in 1954 at 23.0 years for men and 20.3 years for women. Amazingly, it appears that nearly half of women at the time married as teens.

But that median age has been trending upward ever since. It currently stands at the highest level ever: 29.5 years for men and 27.4 for women.

But the record could still be broken if people lived longer, right? Well, if a future president married at the median age, they and their spouse would both have to live to over a century to pass the Bushes or Carters.

People are certainly more likely to do that than they once were, but not as much as you might think. Babies born in 1963, the year before the start of the baby boom generation, had a life expectancy of 69.9 years. This was a substantial improvement from under 50 years in 1900 and the trend continued for another half century.

But improvement in life expectancy has stalled. American life expectancy peaked in 2014 at 78.9 years and declined for the next two years. The decline is small and may not indicate a long-term trend, but US life expectancy isn’t expected to increase substantially in the near future. We could make some improvement with a better health care system and lower inequality — the US currently ranks 31st in life expectancy and almost all of the countries ahead of us have universal health care.

Of course, a couple could defy the odds by marrying young. Indeed, the US is among a small number of countries still allowing child marriage. In almost of US states, if other requirements are met, there is no minimum age requirement. Efforts to curtail child marriage have run into opposition in a number of states, most recently Kentucky, because under current law, a pregnant teenager can legally marry the father of her child regardless of her age.

Still, it seems these rare cases are unlikely to apply to future presidents. The record set by the Bush couple may be broken by the Carters in a few months, but after that, it seems pretty safe.