My grandparents were married for 60 years.

One day I asked my grandfather:
“What’s the secret to loving the same woman for a lifetime?”
He didn’t laugh.
He didn’t say “communication.”
He didn’t say “date nights.”
He looked at my grandmother, who was in the kitchen, and said:
“You don’t love the same woman.”
That confused me.
He said, “She changes every few years. And if you don’t update your love for her, you lose her.”
He told me that the girl he married at 22 wasn’t the same woman at 30.
Motherhood changed her.
Loss changed her.
Time changed her.
“At 40,” he said, “she needed respect more than romance.
At 50, she needed companionship more than passion.
At 60, she needed presence more than promises.”
And every time she changed, he had a choice:
To complain that she “isn’t who she used to be.”
Or to get to know her again.
He said the biggest mistake men make is this:
They fall in love once.
Then stop paying attention.
“Loving a woman for a lifetime,” he told me,
“is deciding to keep feeling curious about her.”
Don’t assume you know her.
Don’t freeze her in the version you once knew.
He leaned back and said something I’ll never forget:
“If you stop studying her, someone else will eventually.”
Sixty years.
Not because it was easy.
Because he kept re-learning her.