We have been married well over fifty years. There have been ups and downs of various sorts over the decades, some serious, others trivial. But here we still are, waiting for death to us part.
I have been thinking recently about love, partly just as you do when you get old, looking over your life and so on, but also partly stimulated by a granddaughter's questions about loving a partner, how that sort of love is different from her love for her mummy ... and so on. (She is looking ahead, has been talking with friends, and reading, reading ...)
I do not really have answers. But some thoughts. Of course some love is better, just as some sex is better. But ...
... I loved my children with a passion when they were small and dependent, a passion that seemed to diminish as they grew older and less dependent. But the depth of love involved between parent and child never really diminished, something brought home long ago by the acute unexpected emotional response I experienced when they left home.
I have never wept as many tears, even for a parent's death, as when I stepped into my oldest's empty bedroom the day she left; I was prepared for this with her younger siblings, though otherwise the experience was the same. But I was glad for those tears -- happy for what they showed me about my love for these children. (I write this through tears, btw, old age definitely makes you weepy!) Happy too, now, for the lives they have made for themselves, dependent as those lives are on that first bond-breaking long ago.
Recently I have been involved with grandchildren. And I have found the passion of love to have returned; different, indeed, from that I experienced with first-time-round children, but just as overwhelming -- and unexpected, though it seems not at all unusual, as a cursory survey of grandparents will show. Some of the deepest happiness of my whole life has arisen from the most humdrum and banal interactions with grandchildren; I will not expatiate.
Now grandchildren, like children, grow up and away ... a process already well on the way, of course, even evidenced by the questions about love I mentioned above.
Do I love my grandchildren? Huh? Of course I dote on them. I love them deeply. But that love now is different from the love I felt for them as tiny defenceless experience-machines. And that love those 'loves' , in fact, now we start to count are different in important ways from the love (or 'loves') I felt, and feel, for my children their parents.
That is by way of preamble. What of the love between me and my old partner? You can guess, perhaps, by now. We are still in love. But of course that is different from those heady days we bated breath and waited to meet again to tear each other's clothes off -- or, perhaps, on other occasions, just to talk again with someone who understood. That was good. But so were the times we ... well, lots of stuff can go here.
Point is, there are different sorts of love, appropriate for different times, people, circumstances. Can we compare these different kinds? Not really. It makes no real sense to ask which was better, the first time we woke up in the same bed or that first evening such-and-such grandchild snuggled into me for reassurance. These different kinds of love are incommensurable : it makes no sense to try and rank them. They are/were all great; I would not have missed any; and together they have made my life worthwhile.
Oh, and yes we still enjoy sex. Maybe not as energetic these days, maybe not so spontaneous in its passion, but still intense and still enjoyable. Can we compare with sex as young 'uns? Not in any 'ranking' sort of endeavour that tries to say which is better. Sex now is different, like love: still nice, still something which makes life go (incomparably) better than without it, without it being in any sense better or worse than heretofore.
So enjoy, and try not to compare.