Love reckons hours for months, and days for years; and every little absence is an age.

Dryden’s line captures a familiar psychological truth: intense affection distorts the experience of time. When one is in love, the mind measures duration not by clocks but by longing; brief separations feel disproportionately large because attention is fixed on the beloved’s absence. The hyperbolic arithmetic—hours becoming months, days becoming years—dramatizes how desire and attachment magnify small intervals into “an age.” Beyond romance, the sentiment also speaks to the way emotion governs perception: time is not merely objective succession but something we live through, stretched or compressed by hope, fear, and yearning.