Aging & Wisdom Quote by John Ciardi

Ciardi’s line is a small demolition charge tucked into a single sentence: it takes the most sanctified word in the language and reduces it to a rotating set of bodily and social functions. The trick is in the cool taxonomy. “Love” isn’t a feeling here; it’s a label, a bit of linguistic packaging slapped onto whatever stage of life needs it. That verb choice (“used to label”) drains the romance out of the room and replaces it with something like marketing copy: we name things to make them legible, respectable, and sellable to ourselves.

The structure does the rest. Three life stages, three blunt redefinitions: “sexual excitement,” “habituation,” “mutual dependence.” Each term quietly lowers the cultural volume. Young love gets framed as heat and novelty; middle-aged love as routine, the deep groove worn by repetition; old love as a practical alliance against the attrition of time. Ciardi’s intent isn’t just cynicism for sport. It’s a jab at the way a single word gets asked to cover incompatible realities, letting people pretend continuity where there may be reinvention, compromise, or necessity.

Context matters: a mid-20th-century American intellectual climate where romantic idealism was being cross-examined by psychology, changing sexual mores, and a growing appetite for unvarnished realism. As a dramatist, Ciardi knows how to make an audience flinch: he puts taboo content (“sexual excitement”) and unglamorous truths (“habituation,” “dependence”) in the same grammatical box as love, forcing the reader to confront what their preferred definition is protecting.