A friend is the best medicine

My girlfriend is, in my opinion, an awfully precise type and I myself get the title 'sloddervos' from her quite regularly. In my experience I am not that at all, but I just work a lot faster and can make decisions quickly.

In my opinion, the profession you have pursued has a lot to do with it. On the other hand, you usually choose a field that has to do with your personal ambitions and skills. To return to my girlfriend; we have both lost our partners and have had a very nice long relationship for years. Considering our age, which is no longer very young, we feel healthy and look younger than our age suggests, or so others say.

Yet this impatient slob has a hard time getting used to my partner's Pietje Precise behavior. According to her, I work too much 'roef-roef'. As a fashion designer, she has worked in Paris and New York with the greats in that field, so that preciseness has an origin.

During my trip through Cambodia I got into a conversation with the German owner of a nice restaurant. He said he wanted to stop because of his age. Talking further about the increase in age, we came to the conclusion that our age difference was 18 years. The good man only wanted to believe me after I showed my driver's license with date of birth.

Waving his hands to the sky, he walked away and soon returned with two glasses of wine to toast to life together. He repeated the “unglaublich” with great regularity.

Proud as a monkey, I still had to send an email to my girlfriend about this event in the evening.

Almost immediately afterwards I was sent a newspaper clipping with the headline "Relationship with Pietje Exactly is as healthy as aspirin" written by the science editors of the NRC. The literal text: That people with a relationship (provided it is a good relationship) are healthier than people without a relationship, was already known. Moreover, it now appears that it is the very best for health to have a relationship with a Pietje Exactly. American psychologists write this down Psychological Science.

Careful, conscientious people are themselves generally healthy and live an average long life, because they exercise, eat healthily and drink little, smoke or take other risks. But apparently they also pay close attention to their partners, according to this study of more than two thousand American couples over the age of 50. The effect is in the order of magnitude of that of aspirin on the prevention of cardiovascular disease, one of the researchers said in an interview.

So men, you know what to do if you want to grow old in good health. For all the nagging of your Pietje Exactly and the subsequent headache, you just take an aspirin.