Love songs will never go out of fashion. But have you noticed that most love songs are limited to the very first stages of love? They’re almost always about two specific topics: either the excitement of meeting someone new, or the sadness of breaking up. It’s rare to hear love songs that focus on love in the decades after the “I do’s”. They’re out there, certainly, but they don’t make the top twenty lists.

It makes sense—by sheer numbers, there are a lot more relationships that start and end than relationships that go the distance. Perhaps the excitement of meeting someone new seems more interesting than the settled daily living of established relationships. There’s an appearance of novelty to it, except that when every song on the radio is about the same kind of novelty it doesn’t quite feel as novel anymore, does it?

It’s not just the radio. The powerful initial excitement of a new relationship really does bring a novel dimension to real life in the real world. But if you only ever experience that one kind of novelty, it quickly begins to wear thin. The same kinds of first dates with the same conversations where you bring out your five best funny stories and impressive tidbits. The getting to know each other’s history, getting to know each other’s preferences, and getting to know each other’s irritations—which leads to getting into the first fights, built on the same kinds of disappointments you’ve both had before, leading to another breakup. And repeat. And repeat.

It might seem counterintuitive, but I’m convinced that the only way to consistently experience true novelty in romance is to stick with one person for the rest of your life. I’m not saying the initial newness will last forever. Of course it won’t. Jessica heard all my best funny stories ten times over in the first years of our marriage. She knew all the impressive facts about myself I could produce (there weren’t many) by our third date. And it wasn’t long before she got to see the unimpressive facts, too. If you stay with one person long enough they’ll see you at your best and your worst. Those irritations that cause the first fights don’t go away with time. But if you can stick with it and find a way through with humility, forgiveness, and grace, then you’ll begin to discover a new, deepening and expanding kind of love that grows slowly over time, changing over seasons like a tree changing colours and budding all over again and every year becoming just a little bit stronger as it reaches for the sky. There is a constant newness and novelty that only comes as you adjust to one another’s differences and begin to bring out the best in each other. When the “first best” stories are worn out and the first dates are over you’ll have to work harder to find new ways to connect. You’ll have to build new stories together, and the effort will stimulate and deepen you. It will expand and improve you both as your relationship breaks new ground, in new directions, through the ever-changing seasons of life.

Love may begin with a flash of excitement, but it grows strong in the ordinary rise and fall of sunshine, rain, and passing days. Each stage of life together brings its own new joys, its own new challenges. Each new experience reveals more about yourself, and the one you love. No matter how well you get to know each other, there are always new depths to discover—each and every human being is a whole world with oceans and ecosystems and jungles and ruins and wonders and even if you had a thousand lifetimes dedicated to the task, you’d never get to the end of discovering them fully.

Looking back, my life with my wife Jessica is very different now from the way it was the day we first met. I’ve grown, and she’s grown, too, and we’ve both grown together. We might be the same people living out the same promises we made so long ago, but there’s a never-ending novelty in staying together that we could never have if we just repeated the same firsts over and over again with different faces.