Looking back, and...

To feel that life together made sense, is to learn to mutually interdependent in a healthy way, to repair conflicts and to feel a "secure base" for each other for decades.

It's amazing I'm almost 5 decades into our marriage and we've built our love by being able to support each other in moments of greatest vulnerability and inhabiting each other's feelings as our own.

They represent the capacity to love from the accepted vulnerability. There is no longer any fear of abandonment or need for defensive self-sufficiency; there is peace in healthy mutual interdependence. To be in a couple for several decades is to have the ability to love from the accepted vulnerability.

Because there is no longer any fear of abandonment or need for defensive self-sufficiency; there is peace in mutual interdependence and this is healthy.

The love I believe in is the one that respects me at all times even when I'm not there to see it. It is to understand that a relationship is built with patience, with communication, with respect and with the constant desire to improve, not to win. That we must also learn to ask for forgiveness, to forgive, to truly listen and to take care of a heart that trusts in us as if it were its own.

We do not reach old age badly from one day to the next. We arrived like this after years saying: “I'll see later”, “I'll fix it later”, “I still have time”.

Accepting your age and moment has its time, its place and when we want to advance or delay it goes wrong. What do I mean? I see very young people who want to become adults too quickly, burning stages ahead of time, to then reach an adulthood that becomes strong and heavy, because whether we want it or not, this stage comes loaded with many responsibilities.

On the other side of the equation we find adults who, being old, do not accept their age, they want to live in their eternal 20s. And while having “a young soul” is valid, accepting the age we are is important to be able to fully live what this stage has to offer, instead of spending energy resisting what is already.

With what I'm writing, I don't want to say that we have to “look old”, but we do assume, losing the fear of gray hair, to accept ourselves, with everything and wrinkles, is to look back to lose that fear of aging, and that anxiety that leads us to lose our way, is something that we must review

Every season has its challenges, challenges and charms. Let's enjoy (and accept what we get).
And the problem is not having structure, it's learning to distinguish when to PERSEVERE and when to ACCEPT and stop insisting, it's part of aging with dignity, and in peace.

Janitze.🌷