Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, in your opinion, what are the benefits of married life in your sixties?

Rosner: I can’t speak about it in general terms, but I don’t know about my situation.

Well, your body requires more maintenance, checkups, and sometimes more treatments as you age, and it’s good to have someone to go through that with you. My wife has taken on the role of caring for me in many ways. At some point, she has decided she’s the better cook, and she’s right. So she does close to 100% of the cooking, and she’s great at it, especially with baking and making bread. 

Jacobsen: I can vouch for that.

Rosner: She’s constantly trying to develop new, healthy dishes. Her last two jobs were as an administrative assistant at several private high schools, but she left that at the end of the last school year to focus on writing. She’s already finished a book, which works well because I’m a good editor. I reviewed her manuscript, which is about 100,000 words, line by line. I mark her work in red on Microsoft Word, and she can accept the edits—it’s how editing works. She gets rid of typos, of course. Still, for other edits, she decides whether she likes my suggestion, prefers her original version or wants to come up with something new.

Her writing productivity motivates me to be more productive, which I need. COVID shut down many of our usual activities, and we haven’t resumed them fully. For example, we used to go to every movie in theatres, but over the past four and a half years, we’ve only seen a couple. Now, we have about five streaming services, and we’re happy with the selection of films that come to us. We watch a lot of T.V. I think it’s not just mindless stuff—we try to watch well-written shows. Broadcast network stuff like ABC, NBC, and CBS has become almost unwatchable for us because it’s overly explanatory, and the plots are too simplistic. It’s what gave T.V. a bad reputation for being lazy and easy, and it mostly just frustrates us now.

So we end up watching better-written shows, which is good for our writing. Watching work by good writers helps improve our writing, too. That’s our life at this point. We’re lucky. My wife had decent jobs for a while, and I had good jobs for quite a while, so we have some financial security that many others don’t have. We’re fortunate in that regard.

At this stage, we’re still trying to be productive. I’m 64, and my wife is 60, and we’re both trying to squeeze out a few more years of productivity and support each other. Because I have excellent medical coverage—a blessing many people don’t have—we’ve been able to attend couples counselling once a week for over 30 years. Our medical insurance covers most of the cost, a huge advantage. Counselling helps us check in on any issues with a neutral third party. We don’t have major problems, but showing your partner you’re doing the work is good. I call it “relationship push-ups.”

Rosner: All in all, we’re lucky to have each other.

Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org

Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ©Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen strictly prohibited, excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.

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