Love improves with age

Not long ago I asked my mom if, after almost fifty years of marriage, she still loved my dad.

She looked at me in that way parents do — as if wondering how to explain something you can only learn by living it.

She didn’t answer. She just smiled.

Later that evening, after I got home, she texted me. This is what she wrote:

“You ask me sometimes if I still love him. And I smile — not because it’s a strange question, but because it’s hard to explain.

Yes. I do love him. But not at all the way I did in the beginning. It’s no longer butterflies and fireworks and dizzy feelings. It’s a love that puts down roots.

Love after this many years isn’t the kind that sweeps you off your feet — it’s the kind that holds you up. It doesn’t make your heart race — it steadies it. It doesn’t make your hands shake — it gives you strength to get up every morning.

We don’t do grand surprises anymore. What we have now are small rituals: morning coffee, silly arguments about towels, the way we cover each other with a blanket when one of us gets cold. They seem like small things… but that’s what life is made of.

At my age I don’t wait for romantic gestures.

I wait to be listened to.

To be hugged when I’m hurting.

To not be left alone, even on days when I don’t like myself very much.

And he does that — quietly, calmly, without any fuss.

Love after all these years isn’t like in the movies.

It’s a language only we speak.

A look that makes sense only when you’ve lived through the hard days, the tired days, and the ‘let’s keep going anyway’ days.

So yes — I love him.

Just not the way I used to.

I love what we’ve built together.

I love the peace of it.

The certainty that even in the worst storm, he will still be my safe place.”