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Ask a centenarian about romance, and more than likely the only response will be a laugh … “If you got flowers, they were from the garden, and chocolates were way too expensive!”
Early last century, romance was much more about building a happy and stable life together.
Wellsford’s Heritage Rest Home resident Ann Shepherd, who turned 101 on Christmas Day, was married to her first husband John Alley for nearly 50 years. She couldn’t recall any particular romantic gesture during that time, but said she always felt loved and cared for.
“When I inherited a little money, I remember he said, ‘That’s not to be spent on the farm – you buy something you want, so I bought a refrigerator’.
“I don’t know if you’d call that ‘romantic’ though!”
Ann believes a happy marriage is always a work in progress.
“John and I just clicked after meeting at a Christian Camp. We’d both recently lost a parent, which gave us something in common. There’s a lot of give and take in a marriage, but my experience is that you get closer by working together.”
Fellow resident and former nurse, Lou Densham, said she had 12 happy years married to Lionel, who’d she’d met at a party in Auckland.
“We’d only been together a few months when he brought me up to Oruawhero to show me a house he’d bought,” she recalls. “He asked me if I thought I could live there, and that was the marriage proposal.”
She said love had to be the basis of any good marriage, but accepting the ups and downs that happen in life, accepting your differences and learning to care for one another were all important ingredients.
To Ann and Lou, love mattered, but it was something that grew after commitment rather than being the reason for it. Romance lived in reliability, sacrifice and the promise of permanence more than in overt affection.
Expressions of romance became more common after World War II possibly due to the rise of films, music and television, which framed love as passionate, transformative and central to personal happiness. Love letters, surprise dates and showy gestures of love became a lot more common around the 1950s.
According to some sources, today’s young couples, the Generation Zs, are much more likely to describe romance in terms of emotional safety, consistency and being ‘seen’. They value communication, respecting boundaries, soft affection, and showing up reliably – less drama, more care.
So while love has changed from handwritten letters to text messages and from courtship to conscious partnership, the core drivers remain the same – to be valued, and to be connected to one special person in a way that makes life feel less lonely.
