There's something about an old couple holding hands that always stops me in my tracks.

I watch them from a distance, and envy tugs.

Theirs is a contentment girded by the familiar, so practiced are they at translating each other's sighs. They have an accumulated history, the kind that will elude someone like me because I got it wrong the first time and then waited a long while before trying again. My happiness is more the knock-on-wood kind, knuckles poised to tap whenever someone remarks on my luck in middle age.

Old married couples have their secrets, and I confess I want to pry. How did they make it? Surely, there were moments of boredom, maybe even betrayals or periods of excruciating indifference. How did they move past those times that derail so many other unions? Why did they decide, time and again, that who and what they were together trumped any fantasy of living apart?

Of course, not all old couples are happy, with themselves or with each other, and no one knows how to reopen a wound like the person who inflicted it in the first place. But most of us can name a longtime marriage or two that keeps the rest of us hopeful. If we are in a good marriage, theirs promises that ours can endure. If we're alone and searching, they are the assurance that love can sneak up on anyone.

Or is love even the point?

Writer Lori Gottlieb has a different take on marital bliss: Forget about it, and forget about finding Mr. Right, too. In The Atlantic's March issue, she advises women to lower their sights to "Mr. Good Enough" and do it sooner than later. Every woman I know who has read it is talking about it.

Gottlieb, a 40-something single woman who conceived her child through donor sperm, argues that too many women pass over a string of acceptable mates standing right in front of them for the perfect guy who never shows up. Before they know it, the picky princesses are saggy maidens, lonely and childless in middle age.

"My advice is this," Gottlieb writes. "Settle! That's right.

Don't worry about passion or intense concentration. Don't nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling 'Bravo!' in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have a family, settling is the way to go."

In other words, dump the "great expectations," she says.

Maybe she's onto something, even if she didn't say it quite right. Romance may start with sparks and flames, but enduring love only sticks around if you keep the embers glowing. Think about whom we end up loving as we get older. So often, the people who never thought they were God's gift to anyone end up being exactly that to us. Through wild successes and unbearable failures, what holds us together is not a fireworks show in the sky but the warm familiar that keeps us coming home.

I am reminded of my friend Peter's mother, Katherine, who was widowed recently. When I met her, I was struck by the peace in her face. This was a woman who had loved, and had been loved, for a long, long time.

She sent me a photocopy of a 1942 Ogden Nash poem that her husband, Joe, had tapped out on a manual typewriter for her many years ago. It is titled "Tin Wedding Whistle," and Joe apparently shortened it to include only the lines that reminded him of his love for Katherine, including these:

"Near and far, near and far,

I am happy where you are;

Likewise I have never larnt

How to be where you aren't.

"Furthermore, I tell you what,

I sit and sulk where you are not.

Visitors remark my frown

When you're upstairs and I am down.

"But how contentedly I view

Any room containing you.

And when you linger late in shops

I long to telephone the cops.

"Then grudge me not my fond endeavor,

To hold you in my sight forever;

Let none, not even you, disparage

Such valid reason for a marriage."

No sparks, no big explosions in the sky. Just a steady ember that keeps a couple holding hands.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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