Calling my parents on their wedding anniversary has felt awkward for a long time. Theirs was always the kind of marriage I absolutely did not want and in fact it made me highly marriage averse to begin. Yet, they have stayed on together and the years and decades have added up. On some of the bigger anniversaries, I have paused to wonder how anyone including a middle-aged child of a couple can have perspective on what makes it work for them. For many years now, they go to a temple somewhere away from home, spend the day there, say their prayers and return home. The date and the fact is acknowledged, the wins they have had together likely gives them the energy they need. All that was and is broken is no longer discussed, too much time has passed, age has diminished if not eliminated any desire for improvement.
Status quo is all that there is left. They were a strong team, aligned on important goals and pulled in the same direction to achieve them. That can and should be called a strong partnership. But there were areas of great discord and disharmony, differences that would never be resolved. From my vantage point, what did not work between them left them greatly diminished and unable to be whomever they were destined to be. It is as if two people meet at the start of a long race full of enthusiasm and hope of cresting that finish line together. They want the same thing and they want to do it together. Even before they are half way there, everything has changed.
They no longer think big, expansive and life-altering. Just get it over with, somehow. They still stick together as that was the agreement and get it over with and they just stay together from habit and inertia. That is a partnership too - no one was abandoned by the other. I like to imagine sometimes who my parents might have been if their partnership provided them both the nurture they needed, if it helped propel the other to fulfill their dreams.
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