Hang In There; It’s Worth It
by Mira and Charles on August 4th, 2008This is a relationship blog; so what does Alzheimer’s disease have to do with your relationships? It should be clear to you by now, my faithful friend, that almost everything has to do with relationships. Check it out: Our marriages aren’t just a thing in our lives. They are something as vital to the ecology of our lives as the water we drink and the soil that grows our food. If our relationships don’t work, our lives don’t work.
And now we see new evidence of this in a paper delivered at the Alzheimer’s Association recent international conference on Alzheimer’s disease.
To quote the New York Times article about it, the researchers found that “people who were living with a spouse or a partner in midlife ran a 50 percent lower risk of developing dementia during their older years than people living alone. … those who had been married and then divorced and remained single in midlife showed three times the risk.”
The point is that the work we do to keep our marriages healthy has a lot of payoffs, including keeping us healthy. I know it takes effort. I know that it seems as though love should be easy, you know, like when you first fall in love and it is so easy. But we need love and a vital relationship in our lives. When we find it, we should hang on to it. If, sadly, we lose it (and the truth is that sometimes love dies), then it is best to acknowledge it and try to find an even better relationship.
It’s the giving up that is the enemy.
