Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

Nin reverses a common assumption about aging: that time and experience inoculate people against the upheavals of desire. She suggests instead that love remains a force that can arrive at any stage of life, indifferent to social expectations about “appropriate” age. The second sentence reframes love as a kind of counter-aging power—not literally stopping time, but softening age’s psychological burdens by renewing curiosity, sensuality, and emotional vitality. In Nin’s broader sensibility, love is not merely romance but an intensifier of lived experience; it keeps the self responsive and imaginative, which can make aging feel less like diminishment and more like continued becoming.