True, there are many kinds of work in a woman’s life. Gainful employment, housework, schoolwork from grades one to twelve – we do them all. In addition, very important: relationship work . The be-all and end-all of a long-term community, as couple psychologists explain it to us: talking about feelings, common hobbies (tandem riding! Tango course!) and spending at least one weekend in a romantic hotel every year. mandatory appointment. Actually one of the most beautiful – but often also a step in the direction of romantic burnout. In a bathtub with claw feet, the two of us wallow in the scent of sandalwood, knead his hairy feet and secretly long for doing nothing.
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Just do nothing
Letting the relationship work slip. Hitting a pause button because life gets too busy at times to worry about love. I’m like a lot of women over 40. Between writing columns and doing interviews, parents’ council meetings and baking bread, I’m usually too tired for foot massages. Or good conversations. I love my husband – for 13 years. But every time I’m lounging alone on the sofa in the evening and he’s bouncing around in the next room, I have a bad conscience and ask: “Do you want to end up in front of the divorce judge? Or would you like to become one of those senior couples who keep quiet about Königsberger Klopsen on Sunday afternoons?” Until the other day I met two women who silenced my conscience. Finally.
love is patient
One is my friend Anita: married 15 years, two children, husband with a glamorous job but travels a lot, a dream house with a garden. Perfect? “We rarely see each other, we don’t have sex every time, everyone does their own thing,” she told me the other day over a glass of wine. I nodded sympathetically, readying my arms in case she wanted to throw herself inside, sobbing. But she didn’t want to. Anita is satisfied: “We have so much in common, it would be laughable if we were injured because of it.”
It’s better to go to yoga with your girlfriend than to an Indian restaurant with your husband, just read in bed for months: That can also be a token of love. You are a great woman, a great man – you don’t have to prove that to me every day. Because I’ll be there tomorrow too. “He is and will always be my great love,” said Anita about her husband. “That’s why I want to keep it. For later, when we have more time again.”
Three days later I came across the channel of Dr. Ruth Westheimer – counselor, suggestion box aunt – a kind of American Erika Berger, only with three tons more charisma. dr Ruth is now 85 years old and tweets clever sentences out into the world from her New York office. Like this one: “To thrive, relationships need room to breathe, not constantly looking at them under a microscope!” That convinced me.
A long-standing love is no longer a tender little plant that has to be adjusted every hour in the ideal penumbra, but a solid plant. A tree in the forest that can sometimes stand in the rain. A good place for a picnic for two. Our fourteenth begins this yearspring . I’m looking forward.
