“How do we know when it is going to work?” she asked, the healing-hearted woman in a hurting couple.
“You don’t,” I said truthfully and painfully, so wishing I had a different answer. A better answer. A reassuring answer.
Because, it’s a daily decision to invest in a relationship. To decide that today, I am in. That I will pour something of me – my time, energy, love, feeling, action – into you and into us.
What will that look like tomorrow? I don’t know. What will that look like twenty years from now? I don’t know. No one knows because you don’t get to know the outcome. We are humans, not magicians. You can only write the story as you are living it in the middle chapters. You are limited in your power and knowledge of only committing to the process of being on the journey today, with the additional fragility that your partner must make that same daily decision.
No wonder this marriage thing is so complicated and often does not work. Because, long partnership is not made at the altar. It’s made in the daily moments of turning towards your partner, when the seduction (for oodles of reasons) is to turn away. Those accumulative micro-moments create longevity.
So, you can only know that it will “work” in hindsight. When you look back and see that yes, indeed … we made it.
So, stop focusing on knowing – as if you can soothe your anxiety that way. Focus on being. That’s the ticket to something somewhere.
For the rise of your life …
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