Emotional Illiteracy

Needless to say, spending a lifetime with the same person requires a lot of readjustments. Finger pointing won’t get you very far, just as biting your tongue won’t. Part of the exercise will always consist of carefully taking an emotional inventory. That is by far the trickiest task, since emotions usually run alongside our daily all-important routines. They are shoved aside regularly, or else glossed over in photoshop albums and drowned in Shiraz and yet, as far as relationships are concerned, they are the most important factor to take into account when analyzing how successfully we relate to each other - especially over half a century. But they can be uncomfortable like tight shoes or traveling economy and so we tend to avoid facing them and hope that by avoiding them, by not even acknowledging their existence, they will go away. A common fallacy. Instead they fester and end up tormenting us like a rotten tooth. They foul up our lives, they impact our health and they usually mess up our relationships way before we end up on a couch. Understanding our emotional states and finding solutions to identified problems which will take into consideration the larger context is a real skill. In fact, it is part of what makes us human and yet, we mostly fail at it miserably.