One of the hardest questions in making a love book is how few pages you can get away with. The instinct is that a long relationship needs a long book.

The Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson storybook is a useful counter-example. It covers a marriage that has lasted since 1988 — and it does it in five pages. Looking at why those five works better than any general advice about length.

The five pages

  1. 1981, the Bosom Buddies set. Rita guest-stars in an episode. They meet.
  2. December 1986, the Three Amigos premiere. They arrive together, publicly.
  3. April 30, 1988, Los Angeles. The wedding.
  4. The long middle. The decades of marriage that follow.
  5. The 2020 Golden Globes. She stands beside him for a lifetime achievement award.

Why those five

Notice what is not here. No children, no filmography, no house, no individual career milestones — and this is a couple with no shortage of those.

What survived the cut is a page each for a different stage of a relationship, not a different event:

  • Page one is the accident. Two people in a room for unrelated professional reasons.
  • Page two is the decision to be seen. A private thing becomes a public one.
  • Page three is the commitment. One date, one place, permanent.
  • Page four is the endurance. The unglamorous part where the relationship is mostly ordinary days.
  • Page five is the proof. Decades later, still standing next to each other.

That is the whole arc of a partnership, and it fits in five pages because each page answers a different question rather than adding another highlight.

The trap this avoids

The obvious version of this book has fifteen pages and looks like a filmography. Every notable event gets a page, and the pages start blurring — another premiere, another award, another red carpet.

More pages would have made it less clear, not more complete. Once you have a page for meeting and a page for committing, a second premiere adds nothing structurally. It is a new fact about the same stage.

The useful test: before adding a page, ask what stage of the relationship it represents. If another page already covers that stage, you are adding a fact rather than a beat.

Page four is doing the most work

The fourth page is the interesting one — and the one most people leave out.

It covers thirty years without covering any specific day. There is no single event to illustrate: it is the accumulated ordinariness of a long marriage, which is precisely what makes the fifth page land. Without it, the book jumps from a wedding to an award and reads as a highlight reel.

This is the page people skip in their own books, because it feels like nothing happened. It is usually the page that makes the rest mean something. A long-distance stretch, a hard year, a period where things were just fine — that is the page that earns the ending.

Applying it to your own book

You almost certainly do not have a Golden Globes page. That is not what makes this transferable.

Take your list of moments and label each one by the stage it represents rather than the event it records:

  • The accident — how you ended up in the same place
  • The decision — when it stopped being casual
  • The commitment — whatever form that took
  • The endurance — the stretch that was hard or simply ordinary
  • The proof — where you are now

If two moments carry the same label, keep the more specific one. If a stage has no moment, that gap is worth more thought than another page for a stage you have covered.

Five is not a magic number — most books land between ten and twenty pages, and more stages means more pages. But a book with all five stages and ten pages will read better than one with twenty pages covering three.

What this book had that yours will have more of

One honest note. This is a book about public figures, built from documented, dated public events — a broadcast episode, a premiere, a wedding date, an awards ceremony.

Your book has something better: the specifics nobody else knows. The Tom and Rita book cannot include what they argue about, or the thing one of them always says. Yours can, and those are the pages that will land hardest.

The structure transfers. The material you have is stronger.

FAQ

Is five pages enough for a long relationship?

It can be, if each page covers a different stage rather than a different event. Most books land between 10 and 20 pages. Length should follow the number of distinct stages you want to cover, not the number of years.

How do I know if a moment deserves its own page?

Label it by the stage it represents. If an existing page already covers that stage, you are adding a fact rather than a beat — keep the more specific of the two.

Should I include the difficult parts?

Usually yes. The "endurance" page is the one most people leave out and the one that most often makes the ending land. It does not need to be dramatic — a distance, a hard year, or a stretch of ordinary days all work.

Can I see the finished book?

Yes — the Tom and Rita storybook is published in full, along with other famous couples.