Tom Hanks turned 70 on the ninth of July, and he marked it the way he seems to mark most things now, which is to say without much fuss and with obvious joy.
There was no red carpet, no showy party that anybody saw. There was a boat, and there was the ocean, and there was Hanks going right off the side of it into the water. He posted the video himself. If you’d followed him for a while it looked familiar, because it was: he’d shared almost the exact same joyful plunge a year earlier, in July of 2025. Same idea, maybe the same water. It has the feel of a ritual, the kind a couple builds quietly over decades until it stops being a vacation and becomes just what you do.
“This guy turns 70 TODAY,” he wrote over the clip. “Great music. Good coffee. Good cause.” Then he pointed people toward a birthday radio marathon he was tied to. Classic Hanks, turning his own milestone into a plug for something small and good.
Seventy years old. Take a second with that one, because it doesn’t quite compute. The kid from Bosom Buddies. Forrest. Woody. The captain, the astronaut, the man on the raft with a volleyball. Seventy.
But it wasn’t his post that stopped people scrolling that morning. It was hers.
Rita Wilson put up a photograph of him from the same trip. Not a glamour shot. Tom sun-browned and easy, a scruffy white beard, sunglasses on, a bandana tied over his head, looking about as far from a movie star as a man can look, and about as content. It’s the kind of picture you only have of someone if you’ve been standing next to them, unbothered, for a very long time.
“Happy Birthday, love of my life!” she wrote. “I love you so much!!!”
That was it. No essay. Just the plainest possible thing, from a woman who has had every reason and opportunity to get tired of saying it and clearly hasn’t.
The comments filled up the way they do when the internet decides it approves of a marriage. Julianne Moore stopped by. So did Isla Fisher and Mariska Hargitay. Friends, not publicists, leaving the kind of notes friends leave.
Here is the number that makes the photo land, though. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson have been married since 1988. That is thirty-eight years. In Hollywood, where marriages are sometimes measured in the way you’d measure a lease, thirty-eight years is not a statistic, it’s a small miracle nobody quite knows how to explain.
They go back further than the marriage, even. The two of them first crossed paths in 1981, on the set of the sitcom that gave Hanks his early break, both of them young and married to other people at the time. It took years and a lot of living before they found their way to each other for good. By the mid-1980s they were a couple, and in 1988 they married, and they simply never stopped.
What’s easy to miss in the birthday sweetness is that this is a big year for both of them. Rita turns 70 herself this October. Two people who met as kids in their twenties, both crossing seventy in the same handful of months, still taking the same summer trip, still jumping off the same boat.
And Rita, unlike a lot of famous couples who guard the machinery of their marriage, has actually told people how they do it. She doesn’t dress it up. The rule she comes back to is an old, unglamorous one: they don’t go to sleep on a fight. Whatever it is, they work it through before the lights go off, so nothing gets to sit and harden overnight. And the other thing she’s mentioned is almost funny in its smallness. They talk. Constantly. They tell each other about their day, the ordinary nothing of it, even standing at the sinks in their shared bathroom. Not the big declarations. The little running commentary of two lives that just keep getting lived side by side.
That’s the whole secret, if you can call it one. No trick, no clause. You clear the air before bed, and you don’t stop telling the other person what your day was like, and you do that ten thousand days in a row, and one summer you look up and he’s seventy and jumping off a boat and you’re still the one holding the phone, still calling him the love of your life and meaning it exactly as much as you did the first time.
There are a lot of ways to spend a seventieth birthday. Hanks spent his in the water, with good coffee and a good cause, and a woman on the shore who has known him for the better part of forty years taking the picture. As birthdays go, and as marriages go, you could do a great deal worse.
