Prime Time - Jane Fonda [79]
“So, when does this start to happen between couples?” I asked.
“Kathy and I became intentional when our kids were becoming teenagers. We set time aside just to be together because kids take up all your time at home. So, we became really intentional. Like we set ten o’clock at night, something like that—the kids couldn’t break in on us. It was time when we could talk about planning a party, or we could—”
“Have sex?” I queried.
With Jewelle Bickford on a hike at Rancho La Puerta in 2008.
“Oh yeah. We’ve always had a good sex life.”
“I think that is the glue,” I interjected. “Isn’t it the thing that helps in the forgiveness, in smoothing over the rough passages?”
“Yeah, absolutely,” Bill replied.
The story of Kathy and Bill’s successful marriage underscores for me the importance of having healthy boundaries, a life outside the relationship, and a willingness to work at it at all stages along the way—that and good sex!
Another long-term relationship that exemplifies these things is the forty-six-year marriage of Nat and Jewelle Bickford. Nat’s the chap you met in Chapter 10 who wrote his life story and purged his ghosts. He was sixty-six when I interviewed him and Jewelle was sixty-four. I first met her at a Women in the Global South seminar at the Council on Foreign Relations. Somewhat cowed by the fact that her background is in assets securitization and that she was, at the time of our meeting, the highest-ranking woman at Rothschild bank, I didn’t anticipate getting to know her and her family and still can’t quite believe that I have a friend who has been a banker. One thing I hadn’t known about Jewelle until the interview was that when her daughters were young she was a stay-at-home wife and mother, doing all the cooking and housework. Only when the girls turned sixteen and nineteen did she, at age thirty-eight, go back to college—Sarah Lawrence.
Just-married Nat and Jewelle Bickford.
Jewelle and Nat with their daughters, Laura and Emily.
“Nat was the one who said, ‘You are too smart not to be college-educated,’ ” Jewelle told me with evident appreciation in her voice. “At that time it was really hard for him to pay for the two kids in private school and my college education, but he felt it was absolutely essential.” My admiration for the two of them grew immensely at the idea that her amazing career didn’t start till midlife and that he wasn’t at all threatened by her morphing from mom to career woman.
The longevity of their marriage is proof that people with loveless childhoods can beat the odds and have a happy marriage. Nat and Jewelle focused on spending time together, on sensuality, and on compromise. Jewelle thinks one reason why they married so young was that it provided a way out of their parents’ homes. I find their compatibility surprising because they are so utterly different: It’s Ferdinand the Bull married to the Little Engine That Could in high gear. Jewelle put it this way: “Nat’s the rudder and I’m the engine.” He said, “We are the reverse sides of a coin. She’s got a tremendous amount of energy, I have a medium amount. She is, let’s see, self-directed, proactive, spontaneous, intuitive. These are not words I use to describe myself. I am more reflective, less spontaneous. I just need time to think about things.”
Although they are temperamentally polar opposites, several things are clear about Nat and Jewelle right off the bat. For one, their marriage has been a priority for them. “We always made time for each other,” Nat said, “even when we had the kids. We couldn’t go away a lot, so we took advantage of the fact that we had two sets of grandparents, both of which were willing to take the kids. So we had some rest from the grind on weekends. And we’ve always liked talking to each other.”
It’s also apparent that there is a lot of physical chemistry between them; it’s been that way, according to Nat, from the start. He recalled, “I had a