The thing about love is that it moves you to act differently. I am not spontaneous by nature but on a recent flight with my wife, I reached out across the aisle to her seat opposite mine and gently stroked her arm as she drifted into semi-sleep. This action was unprompted, save for a sudden desire to touch the one I had been connected to these last 47 years.

I realized that love enables and infuses these moments with not only tenderness but also with an element of renewal that always delights.

As a young man I wondered how older people dealt with the aging of their spouses. Shriveled faces and stooped shoulders replacing the smooth beauty of first desire. After all, it was only human to notice change, to mourn what was lost to time. What could be better than maintaining the excitement of the first kiss, first rush, and first promise? How could we accept or even exist without the delight that drew us into the experience of a committed life to one particular person?

I have come to understand that a love that lasts continuously rearranges

the bits and pieces of life in such a way that a new image of love is produced at each station of marriage.

This phenomenon changes the view we have of each other from seeing with our eyes to seeing with our hearts.

In other words, what was once seen and then felt, with time, becomes what is first felt and then seen through that emotion. Some call that, “the look of love.”

Those who are young cannot imagine their beloved in fifty years; however, time itself creates the image of love in one’s heart for their chosen one that other eyes cannot see. Or perhaps someone might capture a glimpse of it when an aged man rests his hand on the arm of a sleeping woman across the aisle on a plane.