My Husband Has Begun Courting Me Again After 22 Years of Marriage and It Is Deeply Unsettling and I Need Someone to Tell Me What He Wants
Georgina. I want you to take a breath. I want you to take another one. And I want you to understand that what you are experiencing is not a warning sign. It is not a scheme. It is not a symptom of anything that requires a second opinion.
Reginald is in love with you.
I understand that this feels like an ambush. After twenty-two years of a beautifully developed and deeply functional Quiet Devotion System — the crackers, the heated seat, the occasional hand pat during emotionally confusing films — a sudden and full deployment of Active Romance can feel less like affection and more like an incident. You had achieved a stable cruising altitude. Reginald has just fired off a flare.
What you are describing has a name. I call it Late-Stage Romantic Emergence (LSRE) — a phenomenon in which a long-partnered individual, typically in their late forties or fifties, experiences a sudden and acute re-awareness of their spouse as a full, remarkable, irreplaceable human being. It is often triggered by something small. A moment of watching you do something ordinary. A quiet Tuesday when the light was right. Something shifted in Reginald, Georgina, and instead of keeping it to himself he did the rarest, most terrifying thing a long-married person can do.
Now. You ask why you are crying in your car. Georgina, you are crying in your car because you have been loved quietly and reliably for twenty-two years by a man who speaks in crackers and heated seats, and you understood every word of it, and it was enough, and it was good. And now that same man is standing in front of you in the good shirt holding flowers on a Tuesday and asking follow-up questions and something inside you that had settled very comfortably into the language of small gestures is being asked to receive something larger and it does not know where to put it yet.
Put it in the good drawer. Not the one with the note. A new drawer. A bigger one.
Go home, Georgina. Let Reginald court you. You have earned every stanza.