The sun hangs low over the water, casting long shadows across the bar. She laughs at one of my bad jokes and Buffet plays on the Bluetooth. We are talking about the wedding, and she catches me grinning like a sly old fox. Admiring her, appreciating her. It wasn’t a firecracker kind of love anymore. Not the kind that explodes and leaves you wondering where all the noise came from. This love was steady, like the tide rolling in, quiet but certain.

You don’t chase it when you’re older. You don’t run after it with wild eyes and a pounding heart. Love, after fifty, is something you recognize when it’s there, like the smell of rain or the way a good whiskey feels going down. You know it because you’ve known what it isn’t. You’ve been through the wars—divorces, funerals, long nights when the bed was too big and too cold.

At fifty, you’ve made mistakes. Too many, maybe. You’ve said things you regret and left things unsaid that still hang in the air, decades later. But love now isn’t about regrets. It’s about knowing the weight of them and choosing to stay anyway and not repeat the same mistakes. Now love is about making the very most of the finite time you’ve got left together.

When you’re twenty and in love, the world is an open road with seemingly limitless entrances and exit ramps. The future is wide open and you haven’t been wrecked by bad lane changes. You haven’t had to make those broad detours from your plan where you wind up in a shithole town you never meant to go. There’s an innocence to it. Most of us squander it.

You’ve played the dating game, and even if you got good at it, you know it was never for you. The online chats, the fake profiles, deceptions and illusion of limitless choice gave way to the understanding of just how polluted the dating pool is.

She doesn’t wear perfume. Not like the others. Before, it was all jasmine and rose, too much of it sprayed on wrists and necks. Now, it was soap and clean skin and the faint scent of coffee. It was better this way. Real. No illusions, no pretending to be something you’re not.

You don’t need grand gestures at this age. A shared silence can say everything. The way her hand lingers on yours when she passes you the glass. The way he still looks at you, even when your hair is gray and your laugh lines run deep.

It isn’t the love of poets and songs. It’s the love of mornings spent lounging in bed, the love of knowing how they like their coffee, the love of enduring things together: losses, small triumphs, the soft rhythm of days that blend into years.

It different now because we appreciate it more. It’s precious, fleeting, rare, and not to be squandered. This is the person, your person, that you want to spend the rest of your time on the road with. You want to make them happy and you do everything in your power to make it so and it’s mutual, reciprocated. It’s easy when it’s like that, but you don’t take it for granted.

Love after fifty doesn’t hit like a thunderstorm. It’s a slow rain that waters the roots. It’s the kind of love you can stand under and feel whole.