Actually the title is a very lovely poem by Thomas Love Peacock but my thoughts are more about what we construe to be love.
I was always a little surprised at the few newspapers reports when I was a child (about two if I recall) of young men marrying sixty year old women – or more. And the ever ready response of ‘its unnatural’ milled around though not I have to say in my house. My mother was always of the opinion there was something wrong with the men and possibly their relationship with their mothers. But it has struck many people who think about these things that we seem to believe that a few years difference between the man and woman, and the woman being the younger, is natural. Many of the men in my family back two generations ago married twenty year olds when they were thirty and established in their trades.
But it seems to many thinkers that if ‘love’ is something real then it is also intellectual as well as hormonal, and that being so is more likely to exist in people marrying who are forty years apart than in those who are two years apart. The orientation of the mind and its attraction to personality more than body is something people are getting to grips with. To such an extent that psychologists now believe heterosexual people can have a homosexual relationship in their lives not because they have suddenly become bi-sexual but because they have fallen in love with someone’s personality.
I hope you find meaningful love.