NEW YORK — If you have questions about how to make a marriage last, Maury Povich may have the answer.
Povich and his wife, veteran news anchor Connie Chung, are one half of television’s power couple. The two have been married for 41 years and still live life as they are, if not every day.
“Every anniversary, I tell her I’m going to keep this marriage going 10 years at a time,” he says.
The two met as fellow television news journalists working at WTTG station in Washington, D.C., about 20 years before they married in 1984. Now, Chong, 79, and Povich, 86, are in the next phase of their careers, balancing busy work schedules (with the podcast “On Par” and her new best-selling memoir) and visiting a ranch in Montana, where they spend part of the year outside their New York home.
The secret sauce, he says, is a lot of understanding and more than a sprinkle of love.
“We love each other to death. There are many days when we don’t like each other, and that’s okay.” But, Povich said, “I think the reason it worked is more than anything because we understood the business that we were in. I mean, I’m married to my wife. When she got home, she said, ‘I have to go to Pakistan. I’ll see you in a week or so.'” Okay, okay. Some people might say, “What’s that?” and maybe even my husband. Who will take care of the child? ‘So what? And I say, “I’m going to go to Nashville and[interview]country music stars for a week,” and[she]goes, “Okay, okay.”
“I think that kind of consideration, understanding what we’re going through and the tremendous pressure we’re under, helped both of us a lot,” Povich says.
The couple have two children, Matthew, 30, from Povich’s first marriage, and a four-year-old golden retriever, Taxi. Povich said their shared careers in television journalism helped strengthen their bond.
“She has been my go-to person all these years. I always thought of myself as Mr. Chong, and I still do,” he says. “She was a big star long before I was, but I don’t care.”
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“I was a local news anchor and reporter who was traveling around the country trying to make a mark,” Povich recalls. Chong, on the other hand, “was a star at CBS when he was 25 years old in Washington, covering Watergate and all the activities that were going on in the early 1970s, and then he became a big anchor in Los Angeles and then a network anchor.”
However, Povich was “still trying to find himself”.
“I got fired from my job,[then]quit my job,[and]worked in four different cities in seven years,” he says. “We got married in 1984, and within two years Rupert Murdoch took me to New York and started a show called ‘A Current Affair,'” she said in a television news magazine that ran for four years before being aired on The Maury Povich Show in 1991.
“The rest is history, I guarantee you, that’s because that woman agreed to marry me,” he says.
