Of True Love and Old Age

Last updated on February 21, 2024

The other night I watched him doze off in his chair. My husband looked tired – work had been crazy lately, and a lot had been going on in our private lives as well. My friend, my partner, my lover is getting old right beside me.

His beautiful face shows some deep lines now. His hair is getting thinner. The hairline has been receding for years. I could tell it was bothering him at first, but then he made peace with it.

His hair is now snow-white. He started to turn gray in his late thirties; he always joked about his salt-and-pepper hair color. “I have more face now,” he mumbled. He was looking at himself in the hallway mirror, checking if the barber got the cut right.

“That’s good, I can’t get enough of your beautiful face,” I assured him and I mean it. I love the face I know so well. His turtle nose, the deep lines. Laughing and frowning trophies we all get -and so many seem to hate.

What often sounds like I am joking is actually the truth. He was and always will be the most handsome man on this planet. “As long as you think so, that’s all that matters,” and then he smiles.

When we marry, we promise and vow to live together for better, for worse, for richer and poorer, in sickness and health until death might part us. Why don’t we mention age in our marriage vows? For young and older, in youth and age. Shouldn’t that be one of the goals as well?

When we are so young, we promise each other a lot. Happiness most of all, because that is the ultimate goal to find joy and satisfaction with each other, but also as an individual. We didn’t think much about age back then when we met. We were so in love, so eager to start living together, so focused on our careers and the start of our family.

The family didn’t happen and so we got four-legged kids instead. We both had successful careers at one point and still do when you think about it, perhaps different from what we had planned. We have been through a lot together. So many snapshots in our memory book. Moving pictures, like the one we see in the Harry Potter movies. Not really videos, but photos that seem to be rolling.

Sometimes I look at my husband and I wonder who this man is but it never lasts long. With age he got more set in his ways, he is becoming like the old man I once knew -any older man I once knew.

He doesn’t want to admit that he doesn’t hear so well anymore, even though I am convinced he knows it. Now either the TV is too loud, or it’s me that speaks too quietly. He has certain routines that could drive me insane if they weren’t so charming at the same time (if you looked at them with love in your eyes.)

Sometimes I feel more like a caretaker and I worry about him. “How will he manage if something happens to me.” Does he think the same when he looks at me?

Love changes with age, it goes now deeper. There are so many memories, so many stories that involve both of us. We became one. We can finish each other’s sentences and know which buttons to push -if we feel like it.

Where has the young man gone I often wonder, then I smile because I know he might often wonder the same as I do when I look at myself in the mirror. Does he think, “Who is this old woman sitting beside me?” Does he feel the love that comes with the thought too?

In the morning I watched my husband play outside with our dogs, and then right before my eyes, the years fell off my husband, and the young man I fell in love with so many years ago stood in the middle of our lawn. It’s like a mind trick, a hallucination, a glimpse of the past shining through. A mirror reflecting our togetherness.

All about him is so familiar, even though the older and slower way is still something I have to get used to.

And I am getting older right beside him. Just a few years apart, we are cruising along in the same waters.

How can he still love me and be attracted to me, when I find myself sometimes so unattractive now. Oh, the critical looks we give ourselves when we look in the mirror.

Perhaps that special kind of love comes with superpowers that allow us to look deeper. Just as I can still see the young, handsome man in him, he might still see the younger and more attractive version of me shining through.

One of us will leave one day, and the other one will be left behind.

When I was young I wished for me to go first, or we both would leave this world at the same time. The same wishful thinking we all have when the ultimate goodbye plays in our minds.

I just watched AFTER LIFE written and directed by Ricky Gervais, a British comedian and actor. The show is harsh at times, in language and cursing. When I read that Ricky wrote the script with his girlfriend of thirty years in mind I got interested and tuned in. The show is about a widower, who doesn’t want to live anymore, who misses his wife so much that life without her doesn’t hold anything for him. Over three seasons the show gets warmer, kinder more real, and while watching, I felt the love my husband and I share.

Ricky’s character Tony has meaningful conversations with the window Anne, played by Penelope Wilton. They sit on a bench at the cemetery, both visiting the graves of the ones they love and lost.

I understand what she is saying, I feel the same way. I know I would manage better alone, I suppose most women do.

Today on Valentine’s Day, I am looking forward to the next twenty years, our golden years.

In sickness and in health, in poverty or wealth, until one day death will tear us apart. According to my husband, we will be united somehow after life, according to me, we have only this short time here now but I don’t know. Nobody does.

I guess we will see one day in a hopefully far-away future, that will be here in the blink of an eye. Or like Tony (Ricky Gervais) said, “I am rather with her nowhere, as here alone.”

Big, pink fluffy hearts could not convey
what you mean to me this Valentine’s Day.
A card with fancy words saying, “I love you so,”
could not capture my thoughts, but I think you know
today just how much you mean to me,
without balloons, fluffy teddies, sentimentality,
or a fancy meal cooked with sparkling wine,
to say that you are “really mine!”

Instead, I’ll gently kiss your lips,
hold your face, caress your fingertips.
Then you will know how much I really care,
that my life with you, I gladly share.
The joys, hopes, dreams will fade away,
but we’ll be together, as we make our way
down through life’s pathways, hand in hand,
with our precious love that is truly grand.

I gaze at you with welling tears.
We have been husband and wife for over fifty years!

by Laura J Sanders. “The True Love Valentine.” Family Friend Poems, February 13, 2022.