Employee Loyalty and Long Marriages

• My father and mother have been married over 58 years.
  
  
  My father-in-law and his bride have been together for 50 years – they just celebrated their golden anniversary.
  
  My paternal grandfather and his bride had already finished 26 years when he died of cancer.
  
  My maternal grandfather and his bride had already completed more than 30 years of married life when he died.
  
  My paternal great grandfather and his wife had been married for more than 70 years. My paternal great-grandmother, a small built woman, had been a child bride exhausted after 13 child-births.
  
  And almost all of them had been in the same job, some even dying on the job.
  
  It got me thinking. Is there a correlation between loyalty to employers and loyalty to spouses? Even in this very tiny sample size, arguably a number of factors cloud the issue.

• During the times of the people mentioned above, few people switched jobs. There was a clear career path and my ancestors did pretty well for themselves. There was no need to look elsewhere. And they didn’t.

• There were fewer opportunities for change and these opportunities were nowhere as attractive as sticking around on the same job.

• To a man they were all honored and respected employees of the Government, bringing a added dimension of patriotism and sense of duty.

• Mobility and the thought of moving out of town was not very popular – though to a man they all had moved often and to remote places where they had to leave the children behind in some larger town to continue their schooling.

• There are a number of marriages that end in an untimely manner because one of the members wants to break it off, even though the other is inclined to hang in there for the long haul. I would like to add the spouse who would have been the stayer into the list of potential loyal employees.

• And of course the statistical unknowns – marriages that were never meant to be but came into being despite the better judgments of the parties concerned and inevitably broke over the passage of time. These do not yield or detract from the support of the thesis.

• There are other marriages where one of the members died early and we will never know if the marriage would have lasted long or not. But in the Indian context of the 1950s, 1960s we will assume they would.
  
  Though I am personally opposed to any kind of organized profiling and discrimination (I am more than fifty years old and have encountered age discrimination!), this is an interesting thought to pursue – Do long married people make for potential long-term employees? Even more pertinently, on the con side, – does an enterprise thrive on long-term employees or is a constant infusion of new blood even more beneficial and offsets the effects of turnover? And do people who join Government jobs stay there for life?
  
  Turning the coin over to the other side, for people seeking spouses, does longevity on the job predict longevity of marriage?
  
  Food for thought…
  
  My wife and I have been married for 25 years and I am in my fifteenth year with the same employer. My wife has spent over 17 years with the same employer. But we are the outliers in our families because we have both seen more than three jobs apiece! And we may well be the exception that proves the rule!