USD Magazine Fall 2007

F THE LOOK OF LOVE L i v i n g h a p p i l y e v e r a f t e r d o e s n ’ t j u s t h a p p e n by Julene Snyder [ h o p e f u l r o m a n t i c ]

his book. But it was a single moment, when he noticed that after 63 years the couple was still holding hands, that changed his life. He decided to seek out “mar- riage masters,”couples who’ve been happily married for more than 40 years, and ask themhow tomake love stay. But it wasn’t until he enlisted Miller, his childhood friend, as a partner in the project that things started to take shape. “In 2005 we went up and down the West Coast for five weeks and interviewed 100 cou- ples in an effort to start writing the book,” Boggs recounts in a free-ranging conversation. “Then we realized that we really needed to travel around the country and get people from different regions.”When 10

of a dream of one day being able to have my wife and my kids go to grandma and grandpa’s house for Christmas.”Thirteen years later, he was finishing up his master’s degree in education and enduring a nasty breakup. When the phone call came that his grandfather was terminally ill, Boggs decided to do the right thing, the dutiful thing, and spend time with his grandpar- ents while time remained. “To my great surprise, I had a blast on these visits,”he writes in

Boggs is not exactly the easy-to- please type. “Mat needs more than a wife; he needs a bona fide love story.” His parents’ split when he was 14 may have been the initial impe- tus for the 29-year-old Boggs — who graduated with a B.A. in biol- ogy from USD in 2000 — to spend a big chunk of his twenties explor- ing what it means to build a happy marriage. “Their divorce was devastating for me,” he recalls. “It was the loss

or a bachelor, Mathew Boggs sure thinks about marriage a lot. Of course, he’s been imagining his wife-to-be since he was a kid. It’s a quirk that best friend Jason Miller finds endearing. “Since the third grade, I’d witnessed at least a hundred of Mat’s ‘I think I’ve found the one’ events,’” he writes in the

pair’s new book, “Project Everlasting: Two Bachelors

Discover the Secrets of America’s Greatest Marriages.” Problem is,