Love?

Reading this thread I feel I am a Miss Haversham

We met at a dance when we were 18 and he asked if he could take me home. I asked the most important question “Have you got a car?” and he said he had. We got into the old Ford Prefect and I stole a glance at him. He had strawberry blond hair and under the street light it shone gold. His eyelashes were gold and so were the hairs on the back of his hands. He wore a gold signet ring and a gold coloured watch. I had never seen anyone so golden. He drove me home and it was magical. We were married two years later and now 56 years after that first meeting I feel as though I got into that old car and have been sitting beside him on a long wonderful journey ever since. I hope we never reach the end.

Thick skin on the outside but soft in the middle!

Like old cheeses

That's why I said we are lucky.. We have matured together.

No...I don’t think marital love can last all through to the end of life scenario....perhaps when people lived much less than they do now that was a possibility. My loveless marriage is a case of ...I’ve matured and inevitably changed over the years and my husband has remained stagnant and moribund. He has always refused any encouragement toward modernity ...... he glories in being ‘just the same as when he was 25. Whereas I’ve moved along and away from him and indeed from the idea of us. I’m 68 and I have no wish to be married to an ageing teenager.

My grandparents were married for nearly 70 years. (Yes, you read that correctly. Grandma died at age 89, four months before their 70th wedding anniversary.) Grandpa suffered a profound loss when she died. He survived her by just over two years. He moved into a seniors' lodge after she died as he knew he couldn't manage their home by himself (he had heart failure and couldn't do most of the housework anymore). But the night he died was special. My parents, some of my siblings, and some of my aunts, uncles, and cousins had come out to the farm over Christmas and had picked up Grandpa to take him back to the house. (My grandparents lived on a farm and my dad's brother and his wife lived in a separate house on the same farm, so Grandpa still had his house and we have it still.) Grandpa collapsed suddenly in the bedroom. They did CPR and revived him for a few minutes, EMS got there and took him to the hospital, but he died shortly after he got there. I know he hadn't wanted to die alone in the lodge. This was the best possible end for him. He also died on what would have been Grandma's 92nd birthday, had she lived.

Have been with DH for 56 years in July, he was the one I couldn't live without, we are soulmate.
Love changes over the years from very passionate to the comfy slippers but it is still love.

We`d been married for just over 53 years when my husband died. It was a mixture of romance and turbulence, rows and loving, but I don`t half wish he was still here!

Have been married for 55 years, what is love, think I can sum it up in two words "my marriage"

I think Prince Charles' idea of love was, and is, Camilla. For everyone involved it was a ghastly mistake marrying Diana, and if you are not living in the public eye with all the expectations of dynastic marriages and antiquated rules it is hard to understand why he was pressured into doing this. However - it was thirty five years ago and life is clearly different now when his son has been able to marry an American divorcee. As for love lasting for ever - I fear that if passion burned on as fiercely as it did in the beginning we would all be burnt out at thirty; love changes and becomes something calmer, deeper, different ....or fades away.

PaddyAnn, we have been married 42 years and feel like that too. Aren't we lucky?

RosieLeah, it's not if your mum has narcissistic personality disorder!

I too have been married for 47 years,happy until after husband had an affair and I realised how selfish he was,ticking along for the sake of the family but not at all happy,find more pleasure these days spending time with friends doing things that please me

AgeisbutaNumber
Yes I am sure you did and love comes in different forms .There are the kind you have for your children your parents and siblings That kind of love hardly changes unless those you loved in this way have acted in a manner that finds you can no longer have any feelings for let alone love them .
Then there is love for a husband /partner.
Without going into detail and in the early stages of this relationship that kind of love does not always remain the same kind of love in later years It may be a simple case of familiarity or that person has upset you in some way but you can forgive but not forget
So yes you can fall/ run out of initial love but still have affection for that person.

That's lovely paddyann. I agree with your mother.

Love is a decision. It doesn't "just happen". I always say love is what takes over when the romance goes away. My aunt had a blog and she spoke about one night when the kids got sick with a stomach bug. They had 6 kids and I think 3 or 4 got sick - then my uncle got sick. Yikes. I'm sure she wasn't feeling any romance when she had to put him to bed with a bucket after they had just changed several pairs of sheets and maybe even cleaned floors. But love is what takes over at that point.

Now, I've only been married for 7, almost 8, years, but I think the best advice we ever got was that marriage is a verb, not a noun. A marriage needs constant work to keep it going. My parents would periodically go on trips, about once a year or so, just the two of them. They'd leave us with friends. I feel this strengthened their marriage. They've been married for almost 37 years. Hubby's dad didn't put much work into his marriage to Hubby's mum, and that marriage only lasted about 17 years - and probably much of it lasting was to do with MIL's temperament and the fact that they had young kids. (MIL is lovely. FIL is Granddad Who We Don't See - with good reason.)

I was married to "the love of my life" for almost 21 years until his death 6 years ago, our marriage was one full of love & passion. I feel his loss very much but I am not a "grieving widow", I have a new life full of happy memories & new friends.

This was my 3rd marriage, H no1 was a controlling man, marriage lasted 8 months. H no2 I met whilst we were still married to other people. Started with love & passion, my beautiful DD was born, we lived together for several years before marrying. Thought this is it, then we married, lasted 15 months before he left me for an older woman.

Love does change from those heady beginnings but often becomes a deeper feeling for many.

DH & I must be some of the lucky ones - still in love & having a happy life together, after 36 years. I once read an interesting saying: "All happy marriages end unhappily". Now that's food for thought.....makes me value every day we have together. (If we didn't enjoy life together, then we'd part, no question.)

Quizzer - ditto!

Love changes over the years. It may not be as passionate as it once was and settles into something more temperate. It's still love.

Yes, you can run out of love. Married for 47 years, I know that I no longer love my husband. He is now a miserable old so-and-so. He shows me no physical affection. The trouble is that I have no one else in the family to turn to and my financial stability would be seriously affected if I left. So I stick it out and see as little of him as is possible living under the same roof. Although we have discussed my unhappiness I don't think he has any idea how I really feel,

I guess when love dies the marriage then just becomes one of convenience.

I’ve been married for nearly 45 years, and shortly after first meeting my husband, I sensed deeply that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. Last year he was very ill, and I ached to climb onto the hospital bed to hold him. Not possible because of all the necessary kit he was plugged into.
I wanted to reaffirm our bond.
So I’d call love a deep bonding - an alchemy.

May I point out that the words of the wedding service date back to a time when marriages were not based on love, but arranged based on a number of other factors and when most couples believed that respect and liking was something to be worked at and the best you were likely to get in marriage.

I believe you can run out of love, or that love can die. If this happens in a marriage it depends whether there is friendship, liking or respect that makes the marriage worth going on with and whether love could be born again.

All marriages go through bad patches and we grin and bear it until things get better again. If they don't you need to consider whether there is a better alternative.