I choose you every day.
What Does It Mean to Worship Someone You Love?
Every morning for forty-one years, Walter has said the same thing when June walks into the kitchen. “Morning, beautiful.”
And every morning for forty-one years, June has said the same thing back. “You need new glasses.”
She is ninety-six now. Her hair is white, her knees announce themselves on the stairs, and she wears a bathrobe so old it has outlived two dogs. Walter’s eyesight is, in fact, getting worse. None of that has ever stopped him. And none of it has ever stopped her from smiling into her coffee when he says it.
That is worship. Not the dramatic, candlelit, on-your-knees kind people imagine when they hear the word. The real kind, the kind that shows up in a bathrobe on a Tuesday.
Worship, in a relationship, has nothing to do with idolatry, which demands a flawless idol. It has nothing to do with submission, where one person disappears so the other can shine. It does not require self-erasure or perfection from anyone. Walter knows exactly who June is: stubborn, funny, impatient with slow drivers, generous to a fault. He worships a real, imperfect, irreplaceable woman, and she worships a real, imperfect, irreplaceable man.
And here is the central truth of this whole series. Worship is not another act of love. It is what love becomes. It isn’t a fifth practice added on top of the other four. It’s what Seeing, Admiring, Cherishing, and Revering turn into when two people keep practicing them long enough.
When the Five Steps Become One
Look again at Walter’s two words, and you can find the whole staircase inside them.
- Seeing: I see you. He noticed she came downstairs slower today.
- Admiring: I celebrate you. He still thinks she is the funniest person he has ever met.
- Cherishing: I adore you. He bought the oat milk she likes even though he finds it suspicious.
- Revering: I hold you as sacred. He has never once, in forty-one years, used her fear of being abandoned as a weapon.
- Worshipping: I choose you every day. He said “Morning, beautiful” again.
In the early years of a relationship, these steps feel like separate things you have to remember to do. Pay attention. Say something appreciative. Be tender. Don’t fight dirty. Eventually, if you keep practicing, they stop being a checklist and start being a temperament. They fuse, the way separate notes become a chord.
The mistake many couples make is assuming that once love matures, these practices can retire. As if seeing and admiring were the scaffolding, needed only while the house was going up. But love is not a house that stands on its own once it’s built. It’s more like a fire. Stop feeding it, and it doesn’t stay the same size. It goes out.
Love Is Not Chosen Once
A wedding is a beautiful thing, but it is a beginning, not a finish line. Saying “I do” once doesn’t settle the matter forever, any more than eating one excellent meal settles your hunger for life.
The people in long, happy marriages tend to describe something surprising: they didn’t fall in love once. They fell in love with the same person again and again, sometimes years apart. He fell for her at twenty-four because she was dazzling. He fell for her again at thirty-six, watching her rock a feverish baby at three in the morning and sing badly to him. He fell again at fifty-two when she started painting, terribly at first and then not terribly at all. Each time, she was a slightly different woman, and each time he chose her again.
That’s the hidden challenge of lifelong love. The person you married keeps changing, and so do you. A choice made at twenty-five was made about two people who no longer quite exist. Worship means renewing that choice for the people you actually are now. And there is a particular joy in those moments of re-recognition, when you catch sight of your partner across a room, or hear them laughing with your grown son on the phone, and something in you says, quietly and with complete certainty: oh, it’s you. It’s still you. I’d choose you all over again.
The Sacred Beauty of Ordinary Devotion
Anniversaries get the champagne. But if you want to know what a relationship is really made of, skip the anniversary and watch a random Wednesday.
Watch who scrapes the ice off whose windshield. Watch who saves the crossword for whom. Watch who turns on the porch light at dusk because the other one is driving home in the dark. Watch who checks that the other’s medication is refilled, who silences their phone during the other’s favorite show, who says “call me when you land” and actually waits for the call.
None of this would make a good movie scene. All of it is worship.
Reliability turns out to be one of the most romantic qualities a person can have. Not the thrilling unpredictability we’re told to want, but the deep, settling knowledge that this person will show up. That the porch light will be on. That the call will come. Consistency is love proving, over and over, that it was never just a mood. And so much of it happens with no witness at all. Nobody sees Walter warm June’s side of the bed with his own body for ten minutes before she comes up, because she hates cold sheets. Not even June knows he does it; she thinks the sheets are just nicer in winter. He has never mentioned it, and he never will. That is the purest kind of devotion: love that doesn’t need credit.
Choosing One Another Through the Seasons of Life
Forty-one years is long enough for almost everything to happen. Walter and June have buried both sets of parents. They lost a pregnancy in their second year and didn’t talk about it properly until their twentieth. There was the bankruptcy in 1991. There was June’s cancer scare, and the long, frightening week of waiting for the biopsy. There was a stretch in their forties so cold and distant that they both privately wondered whether the marriage would survive.
Worship didn’t mean those seasons were easy. It meant that, in each one, they kept returning to the five steps even when the steps were hard to find. Seeing each other’s grief instead of retreating into their own. Admiring the courage it took to get out of bed. Cherishing each other’s exhausted, unglamorous selves. Revering each other’s dignity in the arguments that came with the stress.
It also meant repair. In the cold stretch, it was Walter who finally said, “I’ve been shutting you out, and I’m sorry.” It was June who said, “I’ve been keeping score, and I want to stop.” Worship is not the absence of failure. It is the reliable return after it, through accountability and forgiveness.
One thing must be said clearly. Lifelong devotion is not a vow to endure abuse. A promise to choose someone every day never obligates anyone to stay where they are unsafe, demeaned, or harmed. Worship is offered freely between two people who both honor each other’s dignity. Where one person is being destroyed, that is not devotion. It is danger, and leaving is a form of self-respect that every tradition of sacred love would recognize.
The Wonder of Knowing Someone for Decades
There is a common belief that passion has an expiration date, that after enough years, romance quietly turns into roommates. The evidence is more hopeful. In a 2012 study, Daniel O’Leary, Bianca Acevedo, Arthur Aron, and their colleagues surveyed a random sample of Americans who had been married more than ten years. About 40 percent said they were still “very intensely in love.” Long-lasting romance is not a fairy tale. For a great many couples, it’s simply what happens when they keep paying attention.
Familiarity only kills wonder if it convinces you there’s nothing left to find. And there is always something left to find, because people never stop changing. Last spring, at sixty-nine, June took up birdwatching, and Walter discovered that the woman he thought he knew completely could identify a warbler by its song from two hundred feet. He was astonished. He still brings it up at dinner parties.
That astonishment is the secret. The couples who stay in love tend to be the ones who stay curious, who ask, “What are you thinking about these days?” as though the answer might genuinely surprise them, because it might.
Over decades, admiration ripens. Affection deepens. Even desire matures, trading some of its early urgency for something richer: the particular electricity of being wanted by someone who knows every single thing about you and wants you anyway. There are few compliments in life greater than that.
Worship Must Flow in Both Directions
A relationship where one person does all the worshipping and the other simply receives it is not worship. It’s a throne room, and throne rooms get lonely on both sides.
In real relational worship, there is no permanent worshipper and no permanent worshipped. Walter says “Morning, beautiful,” but June is the one who, every year on the anniversary of his father’s death, quietly takes him out for the terrible diner pancakes his father used to love. She has never once needed to be reminded. The roles pass back and forth so naturally that neither of them could tell you who gives more.
That’s the point. Couples who keep score, tallying who apologized last, who did more dishes, who planned the last date, are running a business partnership, not a love affair. Mutual worship gives without a ledger, trusting that over a lifetime the generosity will flow both ways. And mutual worship never asks either partner to dissolve. Walter is still Walter, with his own opinions and his ridiculous model trains. June is still June, with her birds and her book club and her strong feelings about punctuation. They honor each other’s individuality, which is exactly why there are still two whole people left to love.
This is why mutual worship strengthens rather than diminishes both partners. Each one is held up by the other. Neither has to shrink so the other can stand tall.
The Joy of a Well-Loved Man and a Well-Loved Woman
You can usually spot a well-loved person. There’s an ease about them. They laugh more freely. They take risks, apologize more readily, and seem strangely unbothered by small humiliations, because they know where home is.
A well-loved man is a particular kind of marvel. So many men spend their lives being needed, relied on, and quietly evaluated. A man who is seen, celebrated, adored, revered, and chosen every single day begins to change. His shoulders drop. He becomes more tender, because tenderness has never once been used against him. He talks more, because someone is genuinely listening. He becomes more confident, not the loud, armored confidence of a man proving himself, but the quiet confidence of a man who no longer has to. This is what restoring a man’s dignity looks like in real life. Not a speech. A home where he is treasured.
A well-loved woman flourishes too. Being chosen daily, by someone who knows her worst and still says “Morning, beautiful,” gives her a kind of security that no achievement can provide. She can be bold in the world because she is safe at home. And when both are well-loved, the relationship becomes something rare: a place where two people get to be fully themselves and fully treasured at the same time. That is not common. But it is entirely possible.
The Atmosphere of Extraordinary Love
Walk into some homes and you can feel it within thirty seconds. Something in the air is warm. People speak to each other kindly when they think no one is listening. The jokes are affectionate. The silences are comfortable.
That is what worship becomes over time: an atmosphere. Not an event, not a gesture, but the moral and emotional climate of a shared life. Grand declarations are lovely, but they’re weather. Worship is climate. It’s what you can count on in every season, built from consistent action rather than occasional speeches.
There’s an important difference between two people who have simply stayed together and two people who are still delighted to be together. Plenty of couples reach their fortieth anniversary out of habit, logistics, or the sheer inconvenience of dividing the furniture. That is endurance, and it deserves some respect. But it isn’t worship. Worship is staying because you still want to, and still being visibly glad, after all this time, that the other person walked into the room. And here is the hopeful part: nobody stumbles into that kind of love by luck. Extraordinary love is not something you wait for, like good weather. It is something you build, deliberately, one chosen day at a time.
I Choose You Every Day
This morning, June came down the stairs a little slower than usual, one hand on the rail, in the bathrobe that has outlived two dogs. Walter was at the stove. He looked up, and his face did the thing it has been doing since 1985.
“Morning, beautiful.”
She opened her mouth to say what she always says. Then she stopped. She crossed the kitchen, put her hands on either side of his face, took his glasses off, and looked at him for a long moment: the white stubble, the deep lines, the eyes that have watched her through every season of her adult life.
“You don’t need new glasses,” she said. “You never did.”
Then she put them back on him, poured her coffee, and sat down to do the crossword he had saved for her, as if nothing had happened at all. Walter burned the toast.
That’s what the five steps look like when they finally become one. He saw her. She admired him. They cherished each other. They held each other as sacred through bankruptcy and biopsies and the long cold years in the middle. And then, one more time, they chose each other, in a kitchen, in their seventies, over burned toast.
There’s nothing in this world quite like it: to be known completely, flaws and all, by another real, imperfect, irreplaceable human being, and to be chosen anyway. Not once, at an altar, decades ago. This morning. And tomorrow morning. And every morning that remains.
Worship is not another act of love.
It’s what love becomes.
I choose you every day.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Companion Song:
— “Forever and Ever, Amen,” Randy Travis, 1987
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.
