Old-Fashioned Love

I watched a piece a few days ago on an 80-something year-old man who says the cure to his wife's Alzheimer's is cuddling. He's an inspirational individual who met his one true love very young and says his advice to other couples is to crawl in bed and cuddle as much as possible. It all sounds heart-warming, but is there any truth to it? Doctors say yes! They say touch can help patients like his wife, and she has certainly shown a dramatic improvement since he began holding her every day.

An article for the Boston Globe states the following:
"Rita's agitated behavior may be improving because Sol's touch is decreasing her levels of cortisol - a stress-related hormone, said Lynn Woods, an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Nursing."

You can watch his story here:
http://video.aol.com/video-detail/touch-may-counter-alzheimers/1258649488

Stories like his are captivating, not only because it's so wonderful to suggest human touch may actually help her condition, but it's an astonishing love story. It got me thinking about the older couples I know in my life. My parents, for example, starting "going together" in 8th grade! My mother went out with him to make another boy jealous and says "he just kind of grew on her." He walked several miles out of his way to pick her up and walk her to school every day... through snow, sleet, whatever. My older brother first proposed to my sister-in-law the first day of kindergarten! I was talking about this with a fellow producer who said her parents are high school sweethearts and every year return to the place they had their first date in their hometown. I sincerely hope love is still like that now. It seems all the amazing love stories are from times far away from our own. They tell stories of parents, grandparents, maybe aunts and uncles. I wonder if the rules of love are changing...

Perhaps the way the world is today creates a whole new medium for people to meet and fall in love. The internet, of course, plays a huge role. The need to go to college probably makes a difference as well. People were married earlier, started families earlier... all out of high school. Would those same couples have stayed together through the college years? I certainly hope so, but I think our way of life today creates a hard atmosphere for old-fashioned love. I hope everyone can still find it somehow. I know I have : )