Live long and prosper more than just a slogan

The wife in front of me was as angry as any I'd seen in a while. Her husband sat across from her, sullen and defiant.

"You're cheating me!" She finally exclaimed in exasperation. "Every time you light up a cigarette you cheat me of my future with you. You're going to die from those things and you don't have to."

"Back off!" her husband responded. "It's none of your business."

We make a lot of commitments when we get married. Some of them we know about; we even include them in our wedding ceremonies. We eagerly pledge in front of friends and family that we will love, honor, respect, be patient with, and care for our spouse to be.

There are other pledges, however, that are more subtle, yet just as important. For example, we might not say it, but we also pledge that we will do our best to get along with our in-laws. Or we pledge, again silently, that we will do our share of the dirty work.

And then there's that unspoken but rather important pledge to not get overly friendly with other people of the opposite sex.

Now, whether we know it or not, we also pledge to do everything in our power to live a healthy and long life. I say "in our power" because how healthily and how long we live is not entirely in our control.

Some of it is genetic: we inherit tendencies toward certain health problems; some of us are genetically programmed for longer lives.

And some of it is pure fate - being in the wrong place at the wrong time can damage our health or shorten our lives.

There are factors in health and longevity, however, which are in our power. We do control what we put into our bodies, our body weight, our exercise habits, and our risk-taking behavior.

Each of these four areas of self-determination has been shown to have a significant impact on both the quality and quantity of our years. What we eat, drink, smoke, or inject does have a lot to do with how sick or healthy we are and will also add years to or subtract years from our lives.

Thinner people do generally live longer. Research has shown that at least 30 minutes of exercise each day can make a huge difference in how long and how well we live. And limiting our exposure to such things as handguns, drinking and driving, and climbing Mt. Everest also makes a difference.

Let's face it, we do have control over such things. And when we are married, how we exercise this control is not just our own business. Like it or not, it is the business of the man or woman we are married to.

Marriage involves all sorts of risks, but one of the biggest is letting ourselves get close, really close, to another person. The longer we are together, the more we share, the closer we get, the bigger the risk. And when we take that risk we don't want to lose even one minute of the closeness we've built.

Similarly, we have made commitments together that assume a long and healthy life. We sign mortgages that will take decades to pay off, have children that will take years (or decades) to raise, and pledge ourselves to other long term "projects" based on the assumption that we will have decades of life together.

Our spouse, then, has taken a risk, hopefully a huge risk, and gotten as close to us as they possibly can. And we, again hopefully, have done the same. And we've made all sorts of plans and commitments together.

Friends, we have no right to make this closeness even more risky, or these commitments even more challenging, by not taking control of those factors in our health and longevity which we can influence. It may not have been in our wedding vows, but all the same it is part of being a responsible marital partner.

We all know everybody is going to die sooner or later. But when it comes to the people we're married to, we'd usually prefer later, much later.

We have a right to expect that they will do everything then can to have a long and healthy life; we likewise have a responsibility to do everything we can to do the same.

• Dr. Ken Potts is on the staff of Samaracare Counseling Center in Naperville and Downers Grove. He is the author of "Mix Don't Blend, A Guide to Dating, Engagement and Remarriage With Children."