Cherishing: Love Treasured. I adore you.
The Extraordinary Experience of Feeling Treasured
Tom is forty-six, six foot two, and has a head cold that he is handling with the quiet heroism of a man who believes he is dying. He is on the couch under a blanket that is slightly too short for him, ankles out, surrounded by a small archipelago of tissues.
His wife comes in with soup she didn’t make from scratch and doesn’t pretend she did. She sets it down, sits on the edge of the cushion, and without saying anything begins running her fingers slowly through his hair.
Tom goes very still. Somewhere behind the congestion, a thought surfaces that he would never say out loud: nobody has done this since I was seven.
That’s what it feels like to be cherished. Not a grand gesture. Not a declaration. Just the sudden, startling awareness that you are precious to someone, that your comfort matters to them, that they would rather be sitting here with your feverish head than anywhere else in the house.
Being loved and feeling precious are not the same thing. Plenty of people are loved in a dutiful, reliable, background sort of way, the way a house is loved. Cherishing is the moment the house discovers it is also a home that someone is glad to come back to. It answers a longing almost everyone carries and almost no one admits: to be held as something valuable, not just useful.
One clarification before we go further. Cherishing is not clutching. Possessiveness treasures a person the way a dragon treasures gold, by guarding it, hoarding it, and breathing fire at anyone who comes near. Dependency treasures a person because you can’t function without them. Control treasures a person as long as they stay exactly where you put them. Cherishing does none of that. It holds someone gently enough that they could leave, and delights in the fact that they choose to stay.
The Five Steps of Worship in Your Relationship
Here are The Five Steps of Worship in Your Relationship™, each of which gives birth to the next:
- Seeing. Love Witnessed. I see you.
- Admiring. Love appreciated. I celebrate you.
- Cherishing. Love Treasured. I adore you.
- Revering. Love Sanctified. I hold you as sacred.
- Worshipping. Love Chosen Again and Again. I choose you every day.
From Admiration to Adoration
Admiration needs a reason. It points at something and says, “Look at that courage, that wit, that integrity.” Cherishing has stopped needing reasons. It points at the whole person and says, “Look at you.”
That shift changes what we love. Admiration loves the toast she gave at her sister’s wedding. Cherishing loves the way she rehearsed it nineteen times in the car and still cried at the second paragraph. Admiration loves his steady hands in a crisis. Cherishing loves that he hums tunelessly while making pancakes and genuinely believes he’s on key.
The quirks, it turns out, are where adoration lives. Anyone can love a person’s best qualities; those are easy. Cherishing is what happens when the snoring, the strong opinions about thermostat settings, and the habit of narrating the plot of the movie you’re both watching all become, somehow, endearing. Not tolerated. Endearing. You find yourself telling friends about these things with a kind of exasperated pride, the way people talk about a dog who eats socks. And because cherishing treasures the person rather than the performance, it doesn’t rise and fall with achievement, appearance, or usefulness. The promotion doesn’t make him more cherished. The extra twenty pounds doesn’t make her less. A cherished person can have a terrible, unproductive, unshowered Saturday and remain exactly as precious as they were on their best day. That is the difference between appreciation and affection: one is earned, and the other simply is.
The Beautiful Language of Small Things
Cherishing rarely speaks in speeches. It speaks in coffee. Not just any coffee. His coffee, with exactly the splash of oat milk that turns it the color of a paper bag, in the chipped blue mug he insists tastes better than the others. She has never once agreed that it tastes better. She uses the blue mug anyway.
It speaks in the closed bedroom door and the hushed voice on the phone because she worked a double and he wants her to sleep until her body is done sleeping. It speaks in the last two cookies in the tin, quietly left alone by a man who would very much like to eat them. It speaks in a text sent at 2:15 on a Thursday: “Thinking about you. Today’s the meeting with your dad’s doctor, right?”
That last one deserves a moment, because remembering is one of the most tender things one human can do for another. Three weeks ago, she mentioned in passing that the anniversary of her best friend’s death was coming. She said it once, while unloading groceries. He remembered. On the morning, he left a note on the counter that just said, “I know what today is. I’m here.”
There’s something almost unbearably intimate about being remembered without having to ask. Asking for care costs something; it exposes the need. Being remembered means someone carried your need for you, quietly, in their own mind, and handed it back as a gift. It says, “Your life is stored in me. I keep track of you because you matter.”
Tenderness as a Language of Love
Some of the most important touch in a romantic relationship has nothing to do with sex. A hand resting on the back of a neck at a red light. A forehead kiss in the hallway. Two people on the couch whose feet have found each other under the blanket without either one deciding to do it.
This kind of touch does real work. In a well-known 2006 study, the neuroscientist James Coan and his colleagues placed married women in a brain scanner under the threat of a mild electric shock. When the women held their husband’s hand, their brains showed less activity in regions associated with threat, and the effect was strongest in the happiest marriages. A hand, held by the right person, is not a small thing.
Couples who keep nonsexual affection alive tend to find that it feeds desire rather than replacing it. When every touch is a prelude to sex, touch starts to feel like a request. When touch is offered freely, for its own sake, the body learns that it is welcome here, and a welcomed body is a much more willing participant in passion.
Tenderness also means making room for a partner to be less than impressive. To be tired, cranky, silly, weepy, or wearing the sweatpants with the hole in them. Cherishing says, “You don’t have to perform for me. Come here.” Few invitations in life are more restful.
Cherishing a Man Who Has Rarely Felt Adored
Many men can tell you exactly when they were last needed. It was this morning, probably, and it involved a jar lid, a jump start, or a spreadsheet. Far fewer can remember the last time someone looked at them with pure, uncomplicated delight, wanting nothing, simply glad they exist.
That’s what Tom felt on the couch. For decades he had been valued for what he could carry, fix, earn, and endure. Being adored for nothing at all, while useless and congested and losing an argument with a blanket, was almost disorienting.
Cherishing a man means letting him be precious apart from his accomplishments. It means adoring his body, not just its usefulness: the forearms, the laugh lines, the solid warm weight of him asleep beside you. It means delighting in his humor, including the jokes only you think are funny. It means treasuring the vulnerabilities he has spent a lifetime hiding, the worry about his father, the fear that he isn’t enough, the tears he swears are allergies.
Something remarkable happens when a man is cherished this way. He starts to open. Not because anyone demanded it, but because the room finally feels safe. A man who knows he will be held tenderly when he is weak can afford to stop pretending he is never weak.
This is not about turning men into projects or patients. It’s about finally seeing them whole, as lovers, jokers, worriers, dreamers, and grown men who still love having their hair played with. And it runs both ways. The same man who melts under his wife’s fingers is the one who will, a week later, rub her feet without being asked while she tells him every single thing that went wrong at work.
Protecting the Heart of Someone You Treasure
Long love hands you a terrible kind of power. After enough years together, you know precisely where someone bruises. You know which childhood memory still stings, which failure they replay at 3 a.m., which single sentence would end an argument in your favor and leave them bleeding.
Cherishing means you never say that sentence.
It means the secret he told you in the dark stays in the dark, and doesn’t reappear as a punchline at your sister’s barbecue. It means her insecurity about her mother is never used as ammunition, no matter how angry you are. It means speaking well of your partner when they’re not in the room, especially when the room is full of people complaining about their own spouses and it would be easy, and a little fun, to join in.
Over time, this consistency builds something priceless: emotional safety, the deep-down confidence that you can be weak in front of this person and it will never be held against you. Safety is not built by one grand promise. It’s built by a thousand moments when the knife was in reach and nobody picked it up.
None of this requires disappearing. Cherishing someone’s weaknesses gently is not the same as excusing harm or abandoning your own needs. You can hold a partner’s struggles with tenderness and still say, “That hurt me, and it can’t keep happening.” Healthy boundaries are part of cherishing, because a relationship in which one person quietly erases themselves is not one where either person is truly treasured.
The Joy of Delighting in One Another
If cherishing felt like homework, nobody would do it for fifty years. The secret is that it’s fun.
Cherished couples tend to have a whole private civilization between them: nicknames that would be humiliating in public, a song they both sing badly in the car, a running joke about the waiter in
Cancún that is now eleven years old and still makes them cry laughing. They tease each other, not to wound but to say, “I know you so well I can poke you exactly where it tickles.”
There are rituals, too. The Saturday pancakes. The way he always says “drive safe, gorgeous” even when she’s only going to the mailbox. The goodnight that has to be said in exactly the same silly voice or it doesn’t count. To outsiders these things look trivial. To the people inside them, they are the architecture of home.
This kind of play doesn’t compete with desire. It feeds it. Laughter and tenderness lower the guard, and a lowered guard is where real passion lives. The woman who can giggle helplessly with her husband at midnight is often the same woman who wants him very much at 12:15. And then there is the simplest pleasure of all: just being near someone you adore. Reading in the same room. Doing dishes side by side. Sitting in the car for an extra minute in the driveway because neither of you wants the song to end. Cherishing keeps that pleasure alive by refusing to let proximity become wallpaper. The person beside you is not furniture. They are the best part of the room.
Cherishing Through Difficult Seasons
It is easy to cherish someone who is thriving. The real test arrives in the seasons when there is very little to admire.
The year he lost his job and spent months applying for positions beneath his experience, shrinking a little with every polite rejection email. The winter her mother died, when she stopped cooking, stopped laughing, and some days stopped getting dressed. The surgery, the long recovery, the diagnosis that rearranged everything. The slow, undramatic changes of aging: the slower walk, the reading glasses on a chain, the stories told twice.
In these seasons, a partner may have almost nothing to give. That is exactly when cherishing shows what it’s made of. Conditional appreciation says, “I value you for what you contribute.” Cherishing says, “I value you, full stop. Your worth to me was never on the scale.”
So cherishing in hard times looks plain. Bringing tea to someone who won’t drink it. Sitting on the bathroom floor with someone who is crying. Saying, “You don’t have to be okay for me,” and meaning it. Laying out his good shirt for the interview. Holding her hand in the waiting room for the third time this month.
What these acts build, over time, is security. The bone-deep knowledge that you will not be traded in when you break. People who know that are braver, more honest, and, oddly, more able to recover, because they’re not spending half their strength trying to stay lovable.
When Cherishing Becomes Reverence
Something deepens when you have cherished someone through enough seasons. Affection, repeated across years of soup and secrets and hospital waiting rooms, begins to harden into conviction. You no longer just feel tenderly toward this person. You have decided something about them: that their humanity is sacred, and that you will honor it on the days you feel tender and the days you don’t.
That is the threshold of the fourth step on the staircase from Seeing to Worshipping: Revering, love sanctified. Cherishing is a feeling expressed in a thousand small acts. Reverence is a covenant, a moral promise that holds steady even when feelings flicker. Cherishing says, “I adore you.” Reverence says, “I will hold you as sacred, always.” One is the warmth of the fire. The other is the hearth that keeps it safe. But that is the next step. For now, stay here a moment, in the sweetness.
Tonight, someone you love will probably fall asleep before you do. They’ll be mid-sentence, or mid-show, or halfway through telling you about a coworker you have never met. Their mouth will go a little slack. Maybe they’ll snore. Maybe they’ll steal more than their share of the blanket.
Don’t wake them. Just look for a minute. Look at the face you’ve seen a thousand times and let yourself notice that it is still, somehow, your favorite face in the world. Pull the blanket back up over their shoulder. Brush the hair off their forehead. Let them sleep, wrapped in a kind of care they’ll never even know about.
That is cherishing. It’s love that doesn’t need an audience, a reason, or a reward. It is love that looks at a sleeping, ordinary, imperfect human being and thinks, with no effort at all, “How did I get this lucky?”
I adore you.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Companion Song:
— “Your Song,” Elton John, 1970
Author Bio
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D. is a best-selling author and provocateur whose work explores love, relationships, sexuality, spirituality, and the magnificent complexity of being human. For more than three decades, she has explored what helps people connect more deeply, love more courageously, and create extraordinary relationships. Her writing blends psychology, spirituality, humor, and eroticism, with a particular passion for restoring the dignity and value of men and exploring the possibilities of Hot and Holy Love. At the heart of her work is a simple conviction: all human beings deserve and are capable of extraordinary love — and a beautiful life.
