If I know how to love anything or anyone at all, I learned it from watching two specific people do it for their entire lives. They've been doing it since 1964, which means they've been at this longer than most people have been alive.
She was 17. They eloped across the Florida-Georgia line and kept it secret because she was still in high school. That's the kind of beginning that sounds like a country song, and honestly it kind of is. They never cared much about what the conventional path was supposed to look like.
They're never apart. When I say that, I mean it literally. They just don't want to be. After all those decades, they still choose each other's company. That's not nothing. That's actually everything.
What Long Love Actually Looks Like
We live in a culture that is obsessed with the beginning of love. The spark. The butterflies. The rush. And there's nothing wrong with that. But the thing nobody talks about enough is what it looks like sixty years in, when you've been through loss and sickness and hardship and change and you're still sitting in the same room choosing each other.
That's not passion in the Hollywood sense. That's something deeper and quieter and far more sustaining. It's commitment that became something almost like breathing. Natural. Unconsidered. Just what you do.
I grew up watching that. I absorbed it even when I wasn't paying attention. The way they moved around each other, the shorthand they had, the way one of them could finish a sentence without thinking about it. That kind of love doesn't happen by accident. It gets built over time, choice by choice, day by day.
Why This Matters for the Men Who Come After
A lot of men never had a model for what healthy, lasting love looks like up close. That gap is real and it costs people. You can't fully pursue something you've never seen. You can want it, but you don't know what it looks like in practice.
If you were lucky enough to have that model, carry it forward. If you weren't, find people who are doing it right and pay attention. Not to copy them, but to understand what's actually possible when two people decide to stay in it for the long haul.
I am genuinely grateful for what those two people taught me without even trying. The capacity to love, to commit, to stay, those things were demonstrated to me before I even had language for them. I don't take that lightly.
That's a gift worth acknowledging. And I do.