The highs and lows of a decades-long marriage – in photos

Over four decades ago, in the ear­ly 1980s, Aimee McCro­ry was a sin­gle moth­er work­ing long days as a finan­cial man­ag­er in Hous­ton, Texas. These would often stretch into the evenings before her atten­tion would turn towards her daugh­ter Eri­ca. Her first mar­riage had end­ed not long before, and she was try­ing to come to terms with per­son­al tragedy that hit her fam­i­ly. As a way of cop­ing she dived head­first into her career.

“My dad was mur­dered,” Aimee explains. ​“It was very unfor­tu­nate – I was try­ing to hold a job and take care of my daugh­ter. I was over­whelmed, but work­ing real­ly hard was some­thing I could chan­nel my ener­gy through to keep me going.”

After wrap­ping up a deal one day with a man named Ted Pre­ston, she asked if there was any­one that he could refer to her for fur­ther busi­ness, as was usu­al pol­i­cy. Pre­ston oblig­ed, set­ting up a lunch meet­ing with a friend named Don. Sit­ting face-to-face with plates of food in front of them, she tried to sell him insurance.

“I need to see your finan­cial state­ment,” she began. ​“I need to see what your income tax return looks like, and then we’ve got to talk about whether you have enough assets to pay state tax­es if some­thing hap­pened to you.”

“Lis­ten,” Don replied. ​“I asked you to lunch because I kind of like you – I’m not inter­est­ed in any of your products.”

That lunch would turn into a din­ner date two weeks lat­er, and as their rela­tion­ship blos­somed Don moved in with Aimee and Eri­ca. The pair mar­ried 18 months lat­er, and they have been togeth­er ever since. It’s been 43 years since that orig­i­nal lunch meet­ing, and now with the pair in their 70s, enter­ing the twi­light years of their lives – Aimee, who start­ed mak­ing pic­tures around a decade ago, has cre­at­ed a deeply inti­mate pho­to­graph­ic series Roller­coast­er: Scenes from a Mar­riage, which is set to be pub­lished as a pho­to­book lat­er this year.

Part of what drove Aimee to make the series came from that pass­ing of time. “[It] began with my grow­ing con­cerns regard­ing death, my fear of los­ing hus­band Don, and the anx­i­ety of fac­ing life alone,” she says. ​“I wor­ry about that a lot because he’s such a strong, sta­ble pres­ence in my life. He allows me to be who I am.” 

The pho­tographs are an inci­sive, hon­est win­dow into Aimee and Don’s mar­ried life. From mun­dane moments in the gar­den, to moments dis­agree­ing over small mat­ters, and a through-the-cur­tains peek at their sex life, the pic­tures snarl with an under­ly­ing ten­sion – a volatil­i­ty famil­iar to cou­ples across the world. ​“It reflects pret­ty much what our mar­riage has been,” Aimee says. ​“Good some­times, not so good at oth­ers – I didn’t realise exact­ly what our rela­tion­ship [was] until I did this project.”

It’s per­haps those sex­u­al moments that pro­vide the most clar­i­ty. ​“Don does not look very hap­py,” she adds. ​“But both of us come from back­grounds that were not nur­tur­ing. We both had child­hood trau­ma, so we’ve always had to work on inti­ma­cy. I could see that there wasn’t a lot of inti­ma­cy hap­pen­ing and it was cathar­tic for me – I thought maybe we need to go back to therapy.”

Those shots are also what makes the series so raw. Sex among old­er folks has long been taboo in West­ern soci­eties, who are often desex­u­alised or treat­ed as a fringe fetish. They are also often unseen, ignored, or even con­scious­ly dis­missed – per­haps most obvi­ous dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, when many lock­down-scep­tics point­ed out the virus ​“kills only old people”.

“My rea­son for doing the project was to bring aware­ness to the fact that we are alive. We are vibrant. We’re active. We cer­tain­ly want inti­ma­cy with each oth­er,” Aimee says. ​“We’re not irrel­e­vant, we’re not to be dis­card­ed because we’re in our seventies.”

“In this coun­try, old­er peo­ple are con­sid­ered irrel­e­vant,” she con­tin­ues. ​“My real goal is to pull back the cur­tain – make you feel uncom­fort­able, because I want to show what it’s real­ly like.”

Roller­coast­er: Scenes from a Mar­riage by Aimee McCro­ry is set to be pub­lished by Kehrer Ver­lag