After decades of teaching others about poetry and passion, I discovered that true love isn't found in sonnets or grand gestures—it's hidden in the mundane rituals we perform for each other long after the butterflies have flown away.
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The other morning, I watched my neighbor's husband scrape ice off her windshield while she sat inside the warm car, scrolling through her phone. They've been married forty-three years.
She didn't ask him to do it. He just grabbed the scraper and went outside in his slippers. That simple act contained more truth about love than all the poetry I taught during my thirty-two years in the classroom.
When you're young, you think love needs to announce itself. At twenty-five, I believed real love should feel like standing too close to a bonfire. Every conversation should crackle with wit. Every touch should send electricity through your bones.
I thought if you weren't breathless, you weren't really in love. The quieter expressions of care seemed like consolation prizes for people who'd settled.
The bonfire years
Do you remember what love felt like in your twenties? Everything was urgent. Every feeling demanded immediate expression. I once drove three hours in a snowstorm because someone I'd been dating for two weeks said they missed me. That felt like love. The drama of it, the grand gesture, the story we'd tell later.
Back then, I measured love by its peaks. The nights we stayed up until dawn talking. The arguments that ended in passionate reconciliations. The way my heart would skip when I heard their key in the door. If a relationship became predictable, I assumed it was dying. Comfort was the enemy of real connection.
I see this same intensity in young people now. They text me about their relationships, using words like "obsessed" and "can't live without."
They show me screenshots of conversations that went on for hours. They worry when the butterflies fade after six months. Have we fallen out of love? they wonder. Should it still feel like the beginning?
What I couldn't see then was that bonfires burn through their fuel quickly. They're magnificent while they last, but you can't build a life around one. You need something that generates steady warmth through February freezes and August heat waves and all the ordinary Tuesdays in between.
Learning the language of patience
By forty-five, I'd discovered that love speaks in a quieter voice. After years of marriage, two children, and the beautiful monotony of shared routines, I understood that love was less about fever and more about fortitude.
It was continuing to be kind when you were both exhausted. It was having the same conversation about whose turn it was to call the plumber without losing your mind.
During those years, patience became my definition of love. When my daughter went through her teenage phase of slamming doors and rolling her eyes at everything I said, love was not taking it personally.
When my son called from college only when he needed money, love was answering anyway. When work stress made everyone irritable, love was giving each other space to be imperfect.
I thought I'd figured it out. Love wasn't the spark; it was the slow burn. It was choosing to stay when leaving would be easier. It was biting your tongue when you could say something clever but cutting. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, it was "two solitudes protecting and touching and greeting each other."
This felt wise and mature. I'd evolved past needing excitement. I'd learned to appreciate the deeper currents that run beneath the surface of long relationships. But even this understanding was incomplete.
The revelation of small acts
Now, at sixty-seven, I see what I missed before. Love isn't just passion or patience. It's the accumulation of ten thousand small kindnesses. It's my late husband getting up to check the door lock every night for seven years, even though I always locked it, because he knew I'd lie awake wondering.
He never said, "You locked it, you always do." He just got up, checked, and came back to bed. "All secure," he'd whisper, and I'd finally relax into sleep.
When Parkinson's began to steal his steadiness, he still tried to get up to check that door. One night I heard him struggling and found him gripping the doorframe, determined to complete this ritual that had become our unspoken language of care. That's when I understood that love lives in these invisible acts of consideration.
It's my friend who still buys her husband's favorite cookies even though she's asked him a hundred times to write them on the grocery list and he never does.
It's the woman at my writing group who programs her husband's coffee maker every night, though he's perfectly capable of doing it himself. It's knowing someone well enough to anticipate their needs and choosing to meet them anyway.
The gift of being truly seen
What changes as we age is that we stop needing love to be extraordinary. We understand that being deeply known and still cherished is the real miracle. Someone who notices when you're quiet and doesn't demand an explanation.
Someone who remembers that you hate cilantro and always asks for it on the side. Someone who knows the difference between your tired silence and your angry silence and responds accordingly.
My second husband and I met at a school fundraiser. I accidentally outbid him on a weekend getaway, and he laughed instead of being annoyed.
Later, he told me he knew he'd love me when I turned to him, mortified, and said, "I don't even like skiing!" He saw past my embarrassment to something worth pursuing. That's love too, recognizing possibility in awkward moments.
As I've written about before, grief doesn't shrink; you grow larger around it. But here's what I've also learned: love operates the same way. It doesn't diminish with age or familiarity. We expand to hold more of it.
The passionate love of youth doesn't disappear; it just gets layered with patience, understanding, and finally, this profound appreciation for someone who knows all your worn-out stories and still wants to hear them again.
Final thoughts
Yesterday, I made tea for a friend who's struggling in her marriage. "We're not the same people we were when we met," she said. Of course not, I told her. The question isn't whether you've changed but whether you're willing to keep choosing each other through every transformation. Love at twenty-five is recognition.
At forty-five, it's acceptance. At sixty-seven, it's the grace of being chosen again every morning by someone who knows exactly who they're choosing. Even if you've already locked the door, love still gets up to check.
Just launched: Laughing in the Face of Chaos by Rudá Iandê
Exhausted from trying to hold it all together?
You show up. You smile. You say the right things. But under the surface, something’s tightening. Maybe you don’t want to “stay positive” anymore. Maybe you’re done pretending everything’s fine.
This book is your permission slip to stop performing. To understand chaos at its root and all of your emotional layers.
In Laughing in the Face of Chaos, Brazilian shaman Rudá Iandê brings over 30 years of deep, one-on-one work helping people untangle from the roles they’ve been stuck in—so they can return to something real. He exposes the quiet pressure to be good, be successful, be spiritual—and shows how freedom often lives on the other side of that pressure.
This isn’t a book about becoming your best self. It’s about becoming your real self.
