I’ve been with my husband for 48 years and I still find him drop-dead gorgeous

My partner of 48 years and I knew each other for a year before we hooked up. We didn’t call it that in 1975, but it’s a great phrase, much better than the “started going round” we used back then.

We were great friends and I liked him very much, but I never thought of him romantically. This is partly because I was the girlfriend of his best friend (yes, I know, such a cliché). But mostly it was because he was – and still is – drop-dead gorgeous: think Brad Pitt when he was young and Jack Nicholson as he aged. I was pretty enough, but there were heaps of better-looking girls than me, so I assumed he was out of my league.

Jane Caro has been with her husband since 1975.

Then I broke up with his mate, and he broke up with his long-time girlfriend, and he started riding his Honda Four (coolest of cool motorbikes in 1975) to my house almost every evening. I thought little of it. We were friends. He hated his el-cheapo shared flat and my parents were easygoing. More than easygoing – my mother took a shine to Ralph that has lasted to this day. Indeed, it is my mother who got our long partnership started.

“Do you think Ralph likes you?” she asked me one afternoon.

“As a friend? Of course.”

“Maybe more than a friend? After all, a boy doesn’t come to see a girl every night of the week unless he’s keen.”

The happy couple in their younger days.

She had a point. It was his 21st birthday and that evening, as usual, Ralph’s noisy motorbike blasted down our suburban driveway. As he was getting ready to leave, I decided to throw caution to the winds and said he couldn’t go until he gave me a birthday kiss. Forty-eight years later (he turned 69 a week ago) the rest is history.

How have we lasted so long when so many other couples who set out together with just as much optimism and determination have not? I suspect a great deal of it was sheer luck. We haven’t had to deal with many of the shocks that bring other couples undone. We’ve always had enough money though, sometimes, just enough. We have not faced the tragedy of losing a child or parenting one with special needs.

I was fortunate to grow up with two parents who modelled how to have a strong marriage (at 91 and 92 they are now the oldest married couple in their retirement community). My husband was not so fortunate: his parents had a troubled relationship and his mother died when he was still a child.

Caro and her husband on their wedding day.

I think being friends before we became lovers also helped. We didn’t just get together in the heat and fog of lust and infatuation, we genuinely liked each other. We still do.

But it hasn’t all been sweetness and light. We have come close to breaking up a couple of times. Once when we’d been together for seven years (another cliché). And after the birth of our second child, when exhaustion knocked us both for six. Again, thanks more to luck than good management, when we could no longer remember why we liked one another we sought professional help. The skills we learnt in those counselling sessions stand us in good stead to this day.

I give the lion’s share of the credit for our long relationship to my husband. He has always been in my corner. Always. And I hope I have always been in his. He makes me feel better about myself. He builds me up, he does not knock me down.

We did not make one person’s career more important than the other. We have both had our moments of being in the sun, and of letting the other shine. We share some things – our views about politics and the world, our sense of humour, our joy in discussion and analysis – but not others. He loves cows and motorbikes and tractors and gardening. I love books and theatre and film and TV.

If there is a secret to our success it is a mundane one: my husband is much more pernickety and houseproud than I am. He has the expectation that he will do at least half the work around the house. I am not his servant. He is not mine. We share the drudgery as well as the fun.

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