Couples in Sync in All Things — Except Aging

That’s true for two heavy-metal headbangers from Texas. Joseph Tharp, a drummer, and Reyna Tharp bonded more than 30 years ago over distorted guitars and pile-driving bass lines. Now they are married, and Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” is still their song.

“Every moment that we’ve been together, I’ve been drumming,” says Joseph, 60. In addition to raising their children, he and Reyna, 53, built much of their life around gigs and rehearsals. “She’s my fricking roadie!” he says.

Reyna has helped set up and break down Joseph’s drum kit. Before gigs, she has braided his long hair so he looks cooler swinging his head around as he smashes cymbals. Reyna has only missed one of his gigs, Joseph says, “and that was during COVID.”

But in fall 2024, Joseph began to feel chest discomfort, tingling in his hands and a powerful weariness. Doctors struggled to diagnose what he calls his “episodes,” which occur sporadically and unpredictably — making him unreliable for gigs. Earlier this year, he quit his most recent band.

He still drums on Sundays at their nondenominational church. “It’s only four songs,” he says, “not four hours.”

Joseph’s episodes leave him feeling that he’s outracing Reyna toward later adulthood. He hopes a doctor will eventually diagnose his trouble and get him back more reliably behind a drum kit. Until then?

“More movies,” he says. They’re also planning their son’s wedding reception, which they’ll host at their home north of Austin. And they just had a company install permanent Christmas lights on their home. Reyna didn’t want Joseph climbing 20-foot ladders. They’ll synchronize the light patterns with music, like at a rock show.

“It will be cool,” Joseph says.

Shifting focus, as Joseph and Reyna are doing, is one way couples adapt, recognizing, as Karen L. Fingerman says, that “change requires action” — action that might be dramatic or simple.

Fingerman, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and director of the Texas Aging and Longevity Consortium, says that with older couples, “you’re adapting in a relationship to both of your changes.”

James Magruder, a 65-year-old writer from Baltimore, anticipated he would age faster than his husband, though Steve Bolton is four years older.

James had suffered an array of what he calls “old-man aches and pains.” Steve, meanwhile, regularly walked up to two hours a day and visited a gym two or three times a week. As a retired research nurse, he seemed positioned to care for James as they aged.

But after a dinner party in fall 2024 at their own apartment, Steve asked James when they were going home. A few months later, he received the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.

Their new reality means they’ve had to adapt — together. Steve’s symptoms worsen in the evening, so they get the day’s business, like his workouts and walks, done early. They still host dinner parties, but with simpler dishes. James took off a couple months this summer from his part-time bookstore job to have more travel time with Steve.

The biggest change is that James is now the caregiver.

“Never thought it would happen,” he says, “and it’s been a steep learning curve. But I also find that I adore this man so much that there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do, and I may not have known that until this happened. I treasure the opportunity to be a caregiver.”

When we spoke, the two were leaving the next day for Uganda, where Steve’s career had often taken him. He wants to see longtime friends and visit the clinic where he was part of a research team that worked on preventing HIV transmission from mother to child during birth.

Now back home, James intends to restart yoga. He hopes Steve will listen to more audiobooks. (Steve: “I don’t have the concentration like I used to.” James: “But you might. You just don’t know yet.”)

Alzheimer’s brings changes Steve wishes he didn’t have to endure, but still, he says, “I’m happy to be aging.”

Am I, like Steve, happy to be aging? Yes, and I want to stay that way. Fifteen months ago, with Sheri’s encouragement, I retired early from my career as a creative writing professor. Regardless of who was aging faster, we decided the years themselves needed to slow. Escaping my job’s hectic pace has helped. Now we travel more, exercise more (she swims half a mile), take more time to identify birdsong.

Three or four times over the past couple of years, when we’ve given ourselves a moment — a glass of wine on a late spring night, a chapter from a particularly good book, the company of friends — Sheri has turned to me and spoken a phrase. The words are a kind of charm or spell, a reminder, but also a way of speaking hope into reality.

“These are the good old days,” she says.