Jaded by his parents' divorce and the countless marriages unraveling around him, Mathew Boggs was a young man who'd lost all belief in lifelong love. Roped into chauffeuring his grandma and dying grandfather on weekly adventures, he realized that, sixty-three years later, they were still madly in love."Now, that's the marriage I want " he said to himself.
Fired up to find more success stories, Mat talked his best friend, Jason Miller, a clueless commitmentphobe, into joining him on a cross-country search for America's greatest marriages, which they called "Project Everlasting." The two bumbling bachelors jumped in an RV and embarked on a 12,000-mile adventure, encompassing the beaches of Los Angeles, the skyscrapers of Manhattan, the bayous of Louisiana, and the mountains of Montana, to discover what it takes to make love last -- not from Ph.D.s or therapists but from more than 200 real couples who had walked the walk to more than forty years of marriage.
In "Project Everlasting," they share their wisdom. Each chapter is dedicated to one of the pressing quest ions the bachelors asked the couples, such as:
"How do you know you've found The One?" "What's missing from today's marriages?" "How do you keep the romance alive?" "What's the most important ingredient for a solid marriage?"
The couples opened their hearts and homes to Mat and Jason to reveal intimate and authentic portraits of fulfilling marriage. Couples like the Byrds, in New Orleans, who lost nearly everything they owned in the devastation of Katrina -- except their love and commitment to each other. Or ninety-somethings Ruth and Eddie Elcott in Los Angeles, who spent the first two years of their marriage separated by World War II and the later years of their marriage reading their wartime love letters to each other at bedtime.
Along the way, Mat and Jason began to understand why their own relationships hadn't worked out quite as planned. They also realized that what they were learning from their wise new friends could change everything for them and -- through "Project Everlasting" -- show their generation and generations to come how to build a marriage to last.