Commitment

It was 1963 and Phyllis Sonnenberg was expecting a proposal.

In a matter of days, her Wall Street boyfriend, Bill, was to board a plane bound for Argentina, where she annually visited her family, and ask for her hand in marriage.

At the last minute, he “freaked,” she chuckled during a telephone interview last week.

“He saw a wedding scene on television and decided he couldn’t handle it,” she recalled. “I said, ‘That’s a bummer, but I still have Charlie.’”

Charles Rosenthal was Bill’s colleague who double-dated with the couple for more than a year. When Mr. Rosenthal heard about the breakup, he took her out to cheer her up.

And he brought along a rose.

“We knew each other and we were familiar with each other,” he said. “We knew our habits, et cetera. So the getting-to-know-you business had long passed.”

The couple was married within a few months, which Ms. Rosenthal says was “obviously the right move,” even though the pair have opposite tastes. Mr. Rosenthal loves skiing and tennis, and his wife prefers the theater and art galleries to sports. She is happy to stay at their home in Manhattan, while he can be found at their second home in East Hampton on nature walks.

Despite their differences, Mr. Rosenthal can’t imagine his life without her.

“I was with him when he was supposed to go to [Argentina] and I was trying to encourage him because his mother wanted him to do that, too,” Mr. Rosenthal said of his wife’s ex-boyfriend. “I think he really wasn’t ready to get married and he was just afraid of it, and some people are. Some people are scared to make the commitment.”

But the Rosenthals weren’t. And neither are the 36 other pairs featured in Sagaponack-based photographer Morton I. Hamburg’s newest release, “Commitment,” a book about couples—many married, some living together who haven’t tied the knot, some straight and some gay—and what the word means to them, with text by Kashmir Hill.

“I believe that commitment applies to almost every aspect of life,” Mr. Hamburg explained last week in an email. “To be committed to what one is doing—in professions, business, in almost everything—one has to be committed to that to really be successful. And I may be right.”

Most of the couples featured in “Commitment” are longtime friends of the Hamburgs, including actor Jerry Stiller and his wife, Anne Meara, and comedienne Joy Behar and her husband, Steve Janowitz.

“This book proves that if anyone knows what commitment means, it’s Mort Hamburg,” Ms. Behar’s and Mr. Janowitz’s testimonial reads. “If you don’t believe us, just ask his wife, Joan.”

The list includes Southampton part-timers Arthur and Diane Abbey. When they met as teenagers nearly 60 years ago, commitment was far from their minds. They were just escaping the summer heat at Jones Beach.

In those days, all of the Long Island high schools claimed their squares of sand with blankets and picnic baskets. On Mr. Abbey’s trips to the Hempstead High section of the beach during the summer of 1954—where Diane Kirshbaum was a senior and he was an alumnus, and Hofstra University sophomore—he kept going back to her blanket.

He liked her peanut-butter-and jelly sandwiches, Ms. Abbey said, and she liked his Pontiac convertible.

“He had a car and he was a college student. It was a very big deal then for a kid going into her senior year of high school,” she said with a girlish laugh during a telephone interview last week. “We grew up together. I think we just go together. We’re a team. We work together. We like to be with each other. We’re with each other a lot. I can’t give you any secrets because I don’t have any.”

She laughed, and continued, “I think it’s a very give-and-take relationship. There’s ups and downs, but a commitment is that you care. You love each other. You’re with each other. You do things together. You have families together. That evolves into a commitment—not only to one another, but to a life together. And I think that’s within you and between you, really.”

When Peri Wolfman and Charlie Gold started dating, familial introductions weren’t necessary. Everyone had already met 15 years earlier during a celebration dinner for their parents—Mr. Gold’s mother had married Ms. Wolfman’s then-husband’s father.

“We were just very good friends for a long time,” Ms. Wolfman explained during a telephone interview last week. “I was living in San Francisco, he was living in New York. Then we happened to both be getting divorced at the same time.”

When she was in Manhattan on a business trip, they went out to lunch. And that was it, she said.

“We were just smitten with each other,” she said. “We hadn’t put that together earlier. It was really just a spontaneous thing.”

Though the couple and their four sons moved into an apartment together in 1980, marriage wouldn’t come until many years later. The first year was filled with fighting—not between Mr. Gold and Ms. Wolfman, but between their children as they sorted out the hierarchy.

Then came the mischief—“paper airplanes that the boys would set on fire and throw down from the terrace of their Gramercy Park apartment; frozen bottles of vodka in the freezer because too much of the vodka had been replaced with water; and a washer and dryer that kept breaking because the boys wanted to see what the spin cycle was like with one of them inside,” Ms. Wolfman wrote.

They eventually settled into a routine. But 16 years into their relationship, the “m” word began to loom, and with it, a sense of unease, she admitted. She was nervous to take the next step.

“We had such a good relationship, not married. We were a little afraid of jinxing it,” Ms. Wolfman said. “And also, in those days—it was 1980 when we got together—it was a little bit different that we weren’t married. It was a bit of fun.”

The dynamic duo decided to surprise their 1996 Labor Day houseguests with a wedding overlooking the fields at their summer home in Bridgehampton. They’ve since sold that home and moved to Southampton.

In retrospect, Ms. Wolfman said she still doesn’t know how they pulled it off. She hid the chuppah in the front yard, organized a clambake reception in the back and baked the cake herself as family and friends looked on.

“I’m making a white cake in my bathing suit and frosting it, and no one says to me, ‘Why are you making this cake?’” she said. “I guess they were scared of me. I was an ogre that day.”

The ceremony went off without a hitch, she said, and just the way she wanted it: simple and beautiful, with a bouquet of blue hydrangeas picked from her garden to carry down the aisle.

“I’ll tell you, marriage does change things—when you go to husband and wife, rather than ‘my partner,’” she said. “It does change things. You take the person more for granted, definitely. Commitment. And I think that’s a fabulous title for Mort’s book. I think commitment is exactly what the word means: you’re committed to someone. Just because something goes awry, you’re not going to jump ship. You’re going to figure it out and stick it out and work it out.”

Even though Mr. Hamburg’s book releases on the international day of love, these three couples don’t need Valentine’s Day to reaffirm their affections, they said. Decades of commitment do the talking.

“I’m just thinking, what day is Valentine’s Day?” Ms. Rosenthal mused over the telephone. “We’re not overtly into that kind of festivities after 50 years.”

Her husband yelled out in the background, evoking a giggle from Ms. Rosenthal.

“Charles says, at least he knew when it was,” she laughed. “We used to exchange gifts, but I don’t think we do that anymore. If I were to get an incredible box of chocolates, I’d be happy.”

“Commitment” by Mort I. Hamburg will be available on Thursday, February 14, online at Amazon.com and on bookshelves nationwide.