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Last week I stood in the card aisle at CVS for twenty-five minutes, holding different birthday cards for my wife, reading the same words over and over. “To my darling wife, who makes every day brighter.” “You’re still the one who makes my heart skip a beat.” “I fall more in love with you every day.”
They weren’t complicated words. Hell, I used to say stuff like that without thinking twice. But standing there under those fluorescent lights, I kept checking each phrase against what I actually felt, like I was translating from a language I used to speak fluently but had somehow forgotten.
My wife was at home, probably wondering what was taking me so long to grab milk and a card. And I was frozen in aisle seven, realizing that the version of me who could say those things without hesitation—without having to stop and check if they were still true—that guy was gone.
When the easy words become the hard ones
I met my wife at a county fair when we were both twenty. She beat me at the ring toss, and I’ve never lived it down. We got married at twenty-two because that’s what you did back then. You found someone, you got married, you figured it out as you went.
For years, the words came easy. “I love you” rolled off my tongue every morning. “You’re beautiful” when she got dressed up. “Can’t wait to see you” when I called from a job site.
I didn’t think about whether I meant them. They just came out, like breathing.
But somewhere along the way, that changed. Not the feelings—I need to be clear about that. I still love my wife. But the automatic quality of saying it, the thoughtless ease of it, that’s gone.
Now when I go to say “I love you,” there’s this pause. This split second where I’m checking: Do I mean this right now? Am I saying it because I feel it or because it’s Tuesday morning and that’s what I always say on Tuesday mornings?
Standing in that card aisle, every pre-written sentiment felt like a promise I wasn’t sure I could keep. Not because I don’t love her, but because I’ve become someone who needs to verify the truth of things before I say them.
The weight of repetition
You say something ten thousand times, it starts to lose its shape. Like a word you repeat until it sounds foreign.
I’ve told my wife I love her every day for forty-six years. That’s almost seventeen thousand “I love yous.” And somewhere in those seventeen thousand repetitions, the words got worn smooth. They became routine. Automatic.
There was a time when saying it felt like something erupting out of me. Now it feels like something I remember to do.
The birthday cards all assumed that first version of love. The explosive kind. The kind where you can’t help but say it. They were written for the guy who bought his wife flowers just because it was Wednesday, not the guy who puts a reminder in his phone for their anniversary.
I almost bought a funny card instead. Something about getting old together, with a cartoon of two people with walkers. Safe territory. But that felt like cheating.
When work becomes your language
I spent thirty years running an electrical business. You want to know what I got good at talking about? Wire gauges. Load calculations. Code requirements. I could talk for hours about the proper way to ground a panel.
Meanwhile, my emotional vocabulary shrank down to nothing.
When I was forty-two, I almost lost my marriage because I buried myself in work and shut my wife out completely. Not on purpose—I just forgot how to talk about anything except the business. She’d try to tell me about her day, and I’d be thinking about tomorrow’s job. She’d want to discuss our relationship, and I’d literally not have the words.
We went to counseling. The therapist asked me to describe how I felt about my wife. I sat there for five minutes trying to come up with something better than “good” or “fine.”
That’s when I realized I’d spent so much time talking about work that I’d forgotten how to talk about anything else. I could explain three-phase power to anyone, but I couldn’t explain what my wife meant to me.
The distance between feeling and saying
Here’s what they don’t tell you about long marriages: the feelings change shape.
That early love, it’s like a fire. Hot, consuming, impossible to ignore. After forty-six years, it’s more like the warmth from your furnace. Always there, keeping you comfortable, but you don’t really notice it unless it stops working.
The birthday cards were all written for the fire version. “You set my heart ablaze.” “You make me feel alive.” “Every day with you is an adventure.”
My love for my wife doesn’t blaze anymore. It’s steady. Reliable. Deep. But try finding a card that says, “You’re the background hum of my life, so constant I only notice you when you’re gone.”
Standing in that aisle, I realized I was looking for a card that matched what I actually felt, not what I was supposed to feel. And what I felt was complicated. Layered. Built up over decades of regular life.
I love my wife, but it’s not the simple, obvious love of those cards. It’s the love of someone who’s seen you at your absolute worst and stayed anyway. It’s the love of knowing exactly how someone takes their coffee and remembering to make it that way even when you’re barely awake.
Learning to speak again
I finally picked a card. Not because it was perfect, but because I’d been standing there so long that my back was starting to hurt.
When I gave it to my wife, she read it and smiled. Then she looked at me and said, “This is nice, but what I really want to know is what you’re thinking.”
So I told her about standing in the card aisle. About how the words all felt like they belonged to a younger version of me. About how I loved her but didn’t know how to say it anymore without it sounding hollow.
She laughed. Not mean, but understanding. “You think I need the fancy words?” she said. “After forty-six years?”
That’s when I realized I’d been trying to force myself back into an old way of talking instead of finding a new one. The cards were asking me to perform a version of love I’d outgrown.
What my wife wanted wasn’t poetry. She wanted truth. Even if that truth was messy and uncertain and took twenty-five minutes in a card aisle to figure out.
Bottom line
I’m sixty-six years old, and I’m still learning how to talk about love. The easy words of youth are gone, replaced by something more complicated but maybe more real.
Those birthday cards assume love is simple. That you can sum it up in a few rhyming lines. But after forty-six years, love isn’t simple. It’s showing up. It’s staying. It’s standing in a card aisle, struggling to find words that match what you actually feel instead of what you think you should feel.
The version of me who could say those flowery things without thinking is gone. In his place is someone who has to work at it. Who has to check if the words are true. Who takes twenty-five minutes to buy a card because he wants to get it right.
Maybe that’s not romantic. But it’s honest. And after all this time, I think honest is what matters.
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