When you're young and you marry, it's all about the good times.

Unless you're somehow forced by circumstances, you marry someone because you are happier with them than without them and you are optimistic that things will get even better the longer you two are together.

[caption id="attachment_1721" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="In sickness and in health"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/couples480-blog480.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1721" title="couples480-blog480" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/couples480-blog480-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" /></a>[/caption]

When you're young, marriage is maybe the ultimate act of belief in the future.

You say the vows -- better or worse, richer or poorer, sickness or health -- but you don't really believe anything bad will happen. You're in it for better, for richer, for health and if any of that bad stuff happens, you'll deal with it with all the invincibility of youth.

It's different when you're older. When you marry past 40, you carry the baggage of previous failure and the awareness that bad things happen as well as good things and you may not be able to control very much about either.

If your life has gone at all according to plan, richer or poorer may not be as much of a factor as when you're younger, but health is much more likely to come into play. My good friend Mick and his wife have been married for nearly 33 years and both are dealing with health problems.

For the last six years of my father's life, my mother was his 24/7 caregiver. She was only a year younger than he was and not in the best health herself, but she gave everything she had to help him. I don't think there's any better way to show love for someone than that, and I wonder how many of us could do something like that for as long as she did.

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