growing and growing and changing
In this adventure of forming a couple, chance plays a large role, but so does intent. Often during an interview, someone will ask me "the secret", of Willie's and my notable relationship. I don't know what to answer becuase I don't know the formula, if indeed there is one, but I always remember something I learned from a composer and his wife who visited us. They were in their sixities but they look young, strong nad filled with enthusiasm. This musician explained that they had married - or more accurately, renewed their commitment - seven times during their long lufe together.

They had met when they were university students, fallen in love at first sight, and had been together for mor ethan four decades. They had passed through various stages, and in each one they had changed and been near the point of separating but had o[ted to review their relationship. Following each crisis, they had decided to stay married a little longer, for they discovered that they still loved each other even though they were not the same persons they'd been before.

"In all, we have gone through seven marriages and njo doubt there are more to come. it isn't the same thing to be a couple when you are raising children, with no mooney and no time, as when you are in your mature years, established in your profession and expecting your first grandchild", he said. He told us, as an example, that in the 1970s, at the height of the hippie maddness, they had lived in a commune with twenty idle young people, he was the only on who was working; the others spent the day in a cloud of marijuana smoke, playing hte guitar and recitiing in Sanskrit. One day he grew tired of supporting htem and kicked them out of the house. That had been a crucial moment when he, with his wife, had had to revise the rules of the game.

Then came the materialistic stage of the 1980s, which nearly destroyed their love because they were both running after success. In that occasion, too, they had adopted to make basic adjustments and start over again. And so it went, again and again. It seems to me that theirs is a formular that's right on the market, and one Willie and I have had to put into practice more and more.
- Isabel Allende, The Sum of Our Days