The love, crossing the time, known certain transformations. As the man who is born, grows and continues to mature and aging, as well as the love.

When we reflect on love, there is always a danger: the idealization, treating it as if it were a kind of dream, a true myth. Such an attitude does nothing. Love is a reality, not a dream. Love must not be dreamed, but lived. And life is growth. And this growth is performed at the time. And in the time are spring, summer, autumn and winter. Each station is necessary for the maturation in love, for growth in love. The love that does not grow, stagnates. And the stagnant water is nest of bugs, insects and microbes, and who drink this water and is about to this pool will suffer from malaria, dysentery, malaria or cholera.

The love, therefore, requires time to grow and develop. Requires the stations for planting, watering, grow, clean, mature, harvest and enjoy the harvest. If not, the love dies, it dries.

The love, crossing the time, known certain transformations. As the man who is born, grows and continues to mature and aging, as well as the love. The spouses, as much as they love, not will love always in the same way. There are advances and setbacks, moments of calm and times of crisis. This obliges the spouses to live in a state of alert, for not going to pique in these critical moments.

I. MATRIMONIAL SPRING (Aurora)

What are the symptoms of the spring season? The trees begin to flourish, the birds to sing, the sun happy our day. The spring offers us morning soft, midday dreamlike, afternoons quiet and nights refreshing, serene, and clear. The Moon shines full in the clear sky spring, almost without stars. Spring is the desired station always, after a winter perhaps crude and ruthless. In the spring the blood alters. In the spring everything is dream, joy, happiness and projects of planting. The lush plants, wet and curled.

Azorín describes the spring: "An almond tree in bloom alone, in a reddish ravine. Above, the sky blue. Clink of a herd far. Are a source. Smell of rosemary and lavender. Shades of blue. Voice of a song that goes out with the evening. Back in the top of the mountain, night, the lighting of a fireplace" (in his book "A village", Riofrío of Avila).

Is the fresh love, still immature, full of dew, illusions, enthusiasm of the first years of marriage. It is a love still fact cocoon that has not opened its flower. It is a love of dream, of beauty. It is a love that has not yet received the soles loud summer, nor the hail or storms of autumn, nor the frosts of winter. It is a love tender, not strengthened yet. It is a love of discovery: in those early years both the husband and the wife, discover together a new universe, with tenderness own the beginning, beautiful, without doubt, but perhaps too easy. In the spring of marriage love is just premiered, tenderness in gestures and words is opening way...has not had time to become contaminated or be refused, or raped.

What would be, then, the characteristics of the spring marriage?

1. It is true that the first years of marriage must be years of spring, where it begins to bloom the love. The tree begins to take away its marriage flower smelly and scented, like the flower of almond. Come the first children and you hear the melodies by the whole house. Everything is full of smiles.

2. Both begin to combine the pronoun "us". Before was the "You and I". Now flows from the lips the "us": "That you think if we, if we, if we travel, if we walked, if we buy...". Is the station of the shared dreams, of the shared projects?

3. Are communicating the mutual tenderness, this trend to get closer to the mood of the other, and not only the body of the other. The tenderness is altruistic, is that desire for understanding, compassion and acceptance of the other. This tenderness is manifested in a look, a smile, a tear in a caress in a way to remove the hair. In the tenderness the soul uses the body, but without attachment and diluted in him.

4. The first months of marriage are a time of euphoria of love. The hearts, full of effervescence, are searched for and complete. Conflicts are minimal; habits, which will take place later to the dangerous routine, are not yet formed. The love is new and is intact. Arise, of course, some misunderstandings here or there, but just outlined are overcome immediately. It is too busy to build the future, the future that now appears as the new present: the common house, the circle of friends common; then task the most precious of all, the newborn, the fruit of love, which launches young couples to a new hope, wonderfully fascinating. Fresh out of the hope that was living the courtship, turns to her by the fruitfulness of the Union. The love, at this stage, is easy and generous.

5. Since the spring of marriage will come the first crisis of the disillusionment that appears between the second and third year of marriage. The months, little by little, have meant that the marriage will be channeled. And the discovery that the principle was only joy, began little by little to reveal what they had not been able to appear before. In the courtship we are prey of illusion: it is believed that everything will be rosy. Has not experienced the daily coexistence, chafing newspapers, the daily defects. In the courtship only viewed the roses; never thorns. They will begin to see it in the marriage, in the middle of the daily life. In the courtship love comes seen in a mirror deformed, that makes me bigger and better than it is in reality. It had built an ideal image, not real.

With this experience is already entering in the summer of marriage. Heat ago, come the soles of the difficulty, sweats in the work of the house, in the care of children. The family of the other spouse also weighs in my family. It costs!

Tips that I give them to live this spring double bed:

1. Begin the marriage with this decision: "I want to make you happy". And not: "I want to make me happy." Only in this way will the love will have a moral value that will flood the everyday life despite the monotony and their erosion.

2. Begin the marriage with this certainty: "No one may be for me everything"; yes can be almost everything, but never the definitive fullness. Why? Because man is a referential be; it is neither cause nor origin of their term; is the path to something. That is why nobody is trained to fill and by always someone. You need a reference higher. The other would be to create too many expectations, error that happens quite frequently and that indicates a lack of knowledge of man and of oneself. Only in this way we will overcome the crisis of the disillusionment. You should not ever say: "You are all to me"; but rather: "Together let us build our marriage in order to achieve the fullness of love". This fullness is not achieved in the first years. It is a fruit that is achieved.

3. Begin the marriage with this challenge and task: "conjugal love is protected and strengthened by the virtue". Virtue is good habit. And achieve the virtues, costs. Only in this way the affective and sexual life will be oriented properly, will be stable, firm and will have strong roots. Otherwise, the sexuality and affectivity will culminate in a rampage, which in a short time it will be a source of bitter disappointment.

4. Begin the marriage metering the jar of the essences of the tenderness. Not uncovering them all stroke, because of the pall on. Tenderness is a delicacy, delicacy, Fineness, elegance, softness, courtesy. Tenderness is benevolence, selflessness, waiver, sweetness, kindness. If missing this tenderness in the first years of marriage, such a marriage can fall into a great disease: The routine; and routine leads to disillusionment. When there is routine, there is apathy, slackness, unconcern to refine and improve the treatment. The tenderness that waits for the women of man is strong and soft at the same time; strong and supple. With these materials there are to build the affection daily.

5. Begin the marriage with this slogan: "Let us not confuse love and sex". If you are confused, is signing the demise of that loving relationship. The authentic love and that relationship end up exhausted. Therefore, fill the love with human values, spirituality. Only in this way that loving relationship will be human, dignified and beautiful.

II. SUMMER MARRIAGE (NOON)

So describes Leo Tolstoy: "Great Drought and stifling heat. The sun sets on the horizon between a haze reddish. Only the dew of night cooled the earth. The wheat that has not been mowing dries and falls the grain. The marshes dried, the cattle die of hunger without find pastures in the meadows burned by the sun. Only in the evening and in the woods you feel something of freshness while are damp with dew. Sometimes one is drowning in the hot dust, suffocating, that the night has not refreshed. And that dust gets into the eyes, in the hair, in the noses, and especially in the lungs of men and animals. The more you raise the sun, most rises that transparent cloud of fine dust and burning. The sun appears a huge area of crimson color. Is not a single breath of wind and men drown in that atmosphere stationary. In these summers there is to go with their noses and mouths covered with handkerchiefs. And when you get home, be thrown on the wells and pasted by obtaining water and drink it until you reach the silt" (War and Peace, part X, cap, 5).

And Azorín describes the summer with these words: "From a height, a vast expanse of blue sea and a coast distant. Headlight beam that passes and becomes shining night. Female suits lightweight and smelly. Open Window on the train. Walk slow during the sunset".

The summer also has its charm. Of the dry land, heated by the sun, exhale the aromas of the Romero, the thyme and of the dry grass.

Also in summer can come a storm. On the horizon your shoulder black round a cloud, Grim, malevolent, magic, and with it a strange drama in the landscape. Suddenly enters the threshold a dust devil passed that illuminates the darkness with innumerable lights areas. Shortly after, another burst and another. Fall some coarse droplets that explode on the dusty road. The drops aware you, and a giant thunder thunders. The cloud covered the horizon. Arrives to the race, a gallop triumphant and as if within it a god barbaric travel. It Rains. The wash-up deepens. Another thunder seems to crush the land. A ray gives his whip aerial to the horses of the cloud. The dust devil passed leaves no see nothing, and suddenly enter a puff of feelings and emotions that seek to secure in the hallway.

What would therefore be the characteristics of the summer matrimonial, of love in the summer of marriage?

1. Is the epoch in which the marriage is really. It abdicates of dreams, it reveals the true face of both body and soul are known; the common life ceases to be a euphoric cohabitation to become an everyday life terribly demanding. It then sets the rhythm of true love. Where there was only one enthusiasm impetuous, appears a constant effort. Less rapture and ecstasy, and more patience reciprocal. Begins the youth and maturity of love.

2. The love has crystallized in the everyday reality. The time eliminated from the love their hope oneiric (dreams) and thus forge it with total strength. Toward the fifth year, the marriage comes into possession of itself. The projections have been lowered, the adaptation phase ended; there is a mutual knowledge that prevents higher friction. The children are already present, giving meaning to the home; at this time the love is installed permanently. It is a love refined by the time and ready to withstand the future and strengthened by the day.

3. Gently, the spouses are consolidating their unity in the common life so easy that it comes to seem trivial, when the truth is that it is a tough victory on the everyday.

3. As everything that is young, this love of summer grows, mature, is bolstered and gain strength, wander about the world and about the time a hope pride, a stubborn desire for happiness. Man and woman are in a state of meeting; its presence is constant at this stage. Perhaps now is the time tastier of love.

4. However, not everything happens without dangers. If I exceeded the first crisis of the spring, the disappointment, then now comes the second: the crisis of silence. If the husband and wife, instead of moving one in the direction of the other, overcoming the inevitable disappointments that arise in the course of the first years, become entrenched in the silence and conformism, fall, more or less at this time, at a crucial stage. If the devil mute seizes them, combining its efforts with the ravages of time, fall both in a kind of lethargy.

5. If there were only silence, since it would be something serious; but if to this we add the step of the years, seizes the love a certain numbness. The couple lives, then in reverse, without grow, without a safe pace, without dynamism. Everything that is subject to the test of time runs the risk of multiple sclerosis. When a marriage succumbs to this risk, when it is frozen in the silence, leaving through the months in a reciprocal isolation, is in danger of death.

6. Beat the time, and this second crisis, is indispensable for the survival of love. This second phase, critical par excellence, is the cornerstone of the durability of the Union. Once expired, gives way to the third station, the third time, the greatest happiness: the love of maturity; but, if the time victorious surrounds the marriage in the silence, both are moving in the direction of the crisis of the maturity.

III. AUTUMN MARRIAGE (TWILIGHT)

Azorín describes it thus: "peaks of cypresses that doubles the wind. The alameda carpeted with yellow leaves. Smell of Christmas fruits in a peasant camera. A cough, some ardent eyes and hands pale and fine. Rose petals that fall. A ticking clock in the twilight. A furniture has creaking...".

In the autumn there are winds, rain. The winds are the dry leaves from the trees. The rains cool and brighten the dry land. The autumn has its charm and its melancholy. The crepuscule offers us an overview of ochre and lit, that clams the spirit.

How is the fall of marriage?

1. Is a nostalgic love. Have accumulated a half or more of years. It is a love that lives of the past, recalling the past times, are pleasant or unpleasant, recalling the children and youth of love, the first and the second crisis. If the marriage achieves overcome, you can believe that it is definitely consolidated. The time becomes, now, a precious ally.

2. In the autumn of marriage the light no longer looks strong and intense. It is rather a faint light and pale. The spouses may have lost the brightness of the youth but have acquired the deep opening of the maturity. Fully man and fully woman, both have reached the summit of virility and femininity, respectively. Although the natural forces are weakened, however, love has been strong, purified of any hesitation, of all the ancient misrepresentations, and its roots are so deep in the time that the home could not be disturbed by any oscillation. It is the hour of the maturity in love. Have fallen the dry leaves of selfishness and sentimentality immature. And will leave behind solid roots and resistant.

3. The marriage here is in the middle of life. Are the most beautiful years of conjugal life, in which happiness is so large and is so well integrated into daily life. In the spring of marriage spoke of happiness, spoke of plans and projects. Here, in the autumn of marriage is happy, just. The happiness, the love and the life have become one and the same thing.

4. That marriage passes from the station of the force, the quickness and endurance and the achievement to the station in that ripen another class of virtues: wisdom, the capacity for judgment, generosity, compassion without sentimentality, the breadth of vision and the tragic sense of life, but accepted with serenity and tranquility, without fuss.

5. If you have not exceeded the previous two crisis (disappointment, silence), is likely to impact, toward the fifteen or twenty years of life in common, with a third crisis, often fatal, the indifference. Time has passed and has paralyzed the love and even has killed. The beginning appeared the disappointment (first crisis), after the first major conflicts; a little later, the silence and the conformism (second crisis): love is transformed into habit, the habit in routine, the routine, by order in indifference (third crisis). It lives next to another, but the hearts are no longer in contact. The bodies are narrow yet, but the Union has lost its meaning. The common life is no more than an appearance that is maintained by either obligation - since they are the children - either by convenience, since the social rules have so. But the unit is broken: two in one that were at the beginning, has been passed, over time, to the rebirth of two individuals, nations by external linkages and roles, but freed their hearts.

6. It is an hour fateful since, surrounded by the indifference, the spouses recover then your emotional readiness. When love no longer exists, there is always room for a new love, both more seductive terms that, having been the first a failure, adheres one desperately to this second promise, it may be the last chance. Then the marriage is separated, installs the infidelity, the common life is transformed into a hell, and consume the rupture. In this unfortunate scenario, time has triumphed over the love. The years have spent the hearts, instead of melted down in a greater love.

7. It is essential to avoid this failure, which comes from the tedium. To achieve this, the marriage has to break the routine that it dominates. Everything that is usual ends for breeding indifference. It is also necessary that husband and wife are granted privileged moments in which break the monotony inevitably hauled by the time. One ends up getting tired of everything, even the other, even when it has been loved passionately. The presence required, the identical family context, the routine step of the days, are all determinants of a possible saturation. This indifference there is only one step.

8. To avoid this outcome and preserve the freshness of love, it is indispensable to know practice - with restraint and weighting - the art of absence. An excessive absence should not be to love; but it is always good to something from it, to remove the danger of tedium that the constant presence brings.

IV. WINTER MATRIMONIAL (SUNSET)

Winter is approaching, sits and opens its width bag of pilgrim. Get the winds from the south. Winds from the south are hunters of clouds; know their dens and they are forced to leave, scared, and flee. The winds are in front of and behind those clouds. These winds will ravage the branches of the trees; and the same trees cables hum, are bent and moan.

The winter is nakedness and whiteness. Nudity, because in winter there is a detachment from all. And whiteness, by snow. Is the peaceful station, par excellence? And the fall of snow is a symbol of peace. The most symbolic of the Nevada is its quietness. The water from the rain and more if it is strong, rumored and the times it kicks off in the branches of the trees in the herbs of the grass in the puddles that flapping. The Nevada, no. The Nevada falls in silence. The silent Nevada has a mantle, to the time of whiteness, leveling, of RAID. It is like the soul of the child and of the elderly, silent and searched. And a field all snowy and night, in the light of the moon which also seems to be of snow...is better when you feel the intimate sense, enigmatic mystic, of the stars.

Year of Nieves, year of goods - the saying goes. Because the snow hardened then by frost, is the flow of water to the rangeland in the summer. Woe to that on reaching the ardent summer life, August passions burns, not preserved in the soul the white snow of the childhood, where stream the jets of freshness enriching. It Snow of childhood, snow of old age too!

In the winter it is cold. Cold by the wind. Cold by the snow. Cold by frost.

Azorín so describes: "A premium night, through the glass of the storefront, there inside in the back room, you see the head tilted to one side of an old. Shelling noise chimes of the cathedral. In the side street sound steps. Bells in the morning. Silence of snow that is falling".

How is the winter marriage?

In the other stations that marriage knew it was deadly; now, in the winter, not only knows that is deadly, but it feels. He feels it in his flesh, like soldiers in the battlefield.

Here is that address the polarity key that according to the psychologist Erikson is Integration versus despair. This marriage has to understand his life as a whole, since that is the only way to get to live their marriage adulthood, his old age, without bitterness or despair. And only thus can get to be understood with the death.

The marriage must be aware of their corruption and to make peace with the existence faulty and worn, in terms of their physical body.

The old age should not be seen as an enemy.

In old age is to be emptied, because we continue climbing on pilgrimage. Therefore, we lose your hair, good presence, health, memory, the money, the applause yesterday. Are lost loved ones, whom he so loved. We are going to the tomb. And this is painful and bleeding.

But the winter is time of contemplation, not as an absorption, but as a remember joyfully the lived. And it is what we lived intimate enjoyment.

What features does the winter marriage?

1. The time has come to menopause and andropause, not only in the biological. It also affects psychological. If you are strong, there is no problem; if not, the wife, until then affectionate and tender, makes a woman cold, irritable and irritating. The man is experiencing a decline in their virility. But before that occurs, there is a sort of flare that anticipates the arrival to neutral. This is what has been agreed to call the demon of midday. Thus we see to men of age rather than mature, until then good husbands, pass by a strange crisis during which, forgetting its respectability, behave as adolescents, sexual in this field. It is the last flame that rises from the ashes before the fireplace is shut down in old age. If the marriage at the time it occurs this momentum, is undermined by the crisis of the indifference, this period can be fatal. Suddenly, learns one that true husband that, according to all appearances, was driving according to the rules of a good father of a family, has allowed the luxury of giving a scandal and destroy their marriage. It is the triumph of the demon of midday.

2. In contrast, if the marriage enters this phase with full harmony, expire easily the difficulties inherent in this time of evolution, and its unity cannot be committed for nothing. Address then the following stage of his loving long pilgrimage through time, and shall enter into the rest of a maturity regained: will be reborn love.

3. In the winter should come the miracle of the renaissance of love. The time has already come a long way. The first maturity has already been exceeded, and later the turbulent time of menopause and andropause. The love, triumphant, advances without mishaps and moves toward a rest full of tenderness, of reciprocal recognition, friendship final. Is the twilight of love, the moment in which, before going through his last years, marriage enjoys the unit conquered, a deep harmony and a new peace. The children have grown, the time has passed, the crisis have been defeated, love has crystallized definitively, the lives have been blown, peace has been achieved, and it is still a last youth, before to extinguish the life.

4. Now is the time for a peaceful happiness, still vigorous and you know beautiful impulses, without shocks, because it has learned patiently to live together; without conflict, because we know how to get to the encounter with the other, and with a capital of tenderness that multiplies, because it feels imperceptibly that time is short and that this love, since always eternal in its project, is limited, however, by the remaining years. The time, that does not forgive, offers then to spouses who have lived happy their struggle, the invaluable reward the renaissance of love. The old age becomes the seal of eternity on the love already lived.

5. The death ceases to be a vacuum and becomes a summit. Have been loved to death is not a privilege but a victory. Those arriving are heroes of the existence and the love that are, in the twilight, bound as in the aurora, more loving than ever, knowing that succeeded in transforming in triumph the hope of his youth. When love has crossed the existence, lets only peace.

6. The love here it is charity, which is the most perfect form of love. The charity is unselfish love, completely free. Both work hand in hand to overcome the latter difficulties, to enjoy the latest clearly day. At the dawn of life - the spring - was a bold aspiration; here, in the twilight of our existence, is a recognition of that conquest. Infinity

CONCLUSION

What the Four Seasons is the best, the ideal?

Each one has its charm, its reason for being. By the four has to pass the love, until arriving to its maturity.

In the spring, love is tender and soft. Is the dawn of love.

In the summer, love is roasting by the soles of life and matures in succulent fruits of understanding, kindness, patience, respect, mutual aid, sacrifice. Is the noon of love.

In the autumn, love is going to divest all, to live the experience of love interior, in solitude. It is a love serene, mature. It collects the harvest of love: the bunches are already ripe to be crushed, become must and go through the winter of the fermentation, for then to offer this wine already cured and restless, smelly. In the fall reflects what is sowed in the spring and what is watered and weeded and was cleaned up in summer. Is the twilight of love.

In the winter, the love necessarily passes through the experience of the body wear, disease, but the soul charged in beauty, if you have exceeded the various crises (disappointment, silence, indifference). Here you can enjoy the victory of love and its fruits: peace, serenity, joy intimate, donation.

Oh, that God will grant them the grace to live in these four seasons of love with conscience, serenity and beauty!