Songfacts®:

• Marx wrote this song about his wife-at-the-time, the actress Cynthia Rhodes. Marx first met Rhodes on the set of the 1983 movie Staying Alive. They began dating a few years later, got married in 1989, and had three sons together before splitting up in 2014. Some of her other credits include the movies Flashdance and Dirty Dancing, and she was for a time a singer in the group Animotion. In our 2012 interview with Richard Marx, he said of this song: "It's really personal. Even though it became very universal, every line in that song is about me and Cynthia. It's about me and my wife. It's as if I sat down and wrote her a letter and just happened to put it to music."
• Marx tells us that the hardest part of songwriting for him is coming up with lyrics that aren't clichéd. When it comes to titles though, he's OK with it. "I don't mind a generic title, as long as the lyrics within it are unique," says Marx. "There are probably 600-700 songs in the world called 'Now and Forever,' But there's not one line of lyric in that song that's like anything else."
• Richard's father, Dick Marx, arranged the strings on this track. It wasn't the first time he worked with his son: he also did the horn arrangements on "Children Of The Night."