Love is found in a thousand small acts.
Cherishing Is Different Than Loving
He is standing at the stove at six-fifteen in the morning, and he does not know she is watching him from the doorway. He is making her tea the way she likes it — bag in for exactly two minutes, a spoon of honey stirred in before the milk, never after, because he learned once, years ago, that the honey dissolves better that way — and he is humming something tuneless, some song that exists only in his own head, and he has no idea that this is the moment. That this, right here, two minutes of steeping and a man who remembers how she takes her tea, is the whole of what she will remember about their marriage when she is very old and someone asks her if she was happy.
She won’t remember to tell them about the honeymoon. She’ll tell them about the tea.
Everybody thinks love is the big scene. The proposal on one knee, the vow read off a shaking piece of paper, the anniversary trip to the place where it all began. But I have sat across from hundreds of people in my office, and I have learned something the movies never tell you: love is common. Love is, frankly, everywhere. People fall in love the way they catch colds — helplessly, often inconveniently, and usually more than once in a lifetime, sometimes with people who are terrible for them. What is rare, what is so rare that when I see it I want to stand up in the middle of the session and applaud, is cherishing.
Loving someone is a feeling that arrives, uninvited, the way weather arrives. Cherishing someone is a practice you build, morning by morning, the way you’d build a callus, or a muscle, or a really good marriage — through repeated, unglamorous, deliberate use. You can love a person and still forget to look at them for whole seasons at a time. You can love a person desperately and still let a decade slide by without once saying the thing you noticed about them yesterday, the small thing, the thing that made you fall for them all over again for four seconds in the kitchen before the phone rang and the moment got swallowed by the day. Love, left alone, drifts. But you cannot cherish someone by accident. Cherishing requires that you keep showing up with your eyes open, on purpose, again and again, long after the falling-in-love part has quieted down into something steadier.
Here is the difference, distilled as plainly as I can manage: love is what you feel. Cherishing is what you do about it, over and over, in rooms nobody else will ever see, on days nobody will remember, in gestures so small they wouldn’t survive being written down — except here I am, writing them down, because I think somebody should.
People I have known who were truly cherished, and not one of them found out through a grand declaration. They found out the way you find out it’s spring — not because someone announced it, but because one day you noticed the air had changed, the light had changed, something in the whole texture of your life had shifted while you weren’t looking directly at it. A cherished woman knows she matters before her husband ever says the words I love you, because he has already shown her a thousand times over in the specific gravity of how he treats her on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon when nothing is being tested and no one is performing for an audience. A cherished man knows he is wanted before anyone tells him so in words, because someone kept the good chair for him, kept his coffee cup filled without being asked, kept a version of Saturday morning that exists nowhere else in the world except in the particular, unrepeatable space between the two of them.
This chapter is about that space. It’s about the difference between being loved and being cherished, and about the fact that you can build the second one, on purpose, starting today, regardless of how long you’ve been together or how tired the relationship has gotten, or how far the two of you have drifted from whatever you once had. Cherishing is not a mood you wait around for, the way you’d wait for inspiration to strike before writing a letter. It’s a discipline you choose, the way an athlete chooses to show up before dawn for a practice nobody’s watching. And it is, I promise you — having watched hundreds of relationships up close, the ones that thrived and the ones that quietly starved — the sturdiest kind of love there is. It outlasts the honeymoon. It outlasts the hormones. It is, frankly, the only kind of love built to survive forty years in the same house.
What Does It Mean to Cherish Someone?
Let’s get precise about a word we’ve let go soft with overuse, the way “amazing” has come to mean anything from a sunset to a sandwich.
To cherish someone is to hold them the way you’d hold something irreplaceable — carefully, with your attention fully on it, aware the whole time of exactly what it would cost you to lose it. It is delight plus attentiveness plus gratitude plus a kind of reverence that never quite hardens into routine, no matter how many years pass. It is emotional generosity practiced as a daily habit rather than an occasional, weather-dependent gift you hand out when you happen to be in the mood.
But before I tell you what cherishing is, I want to clear the room of its impostors, because half the trouble people have with love is that somewhere along the way they mistook one of these five things for the real one, and spent years wondering why the real thing never showed up.
Dependency is not cherishing. Dependency says, I need you in order to function, and it can look, from a distance, remarkably like devotion — the constant texting, the inability to make a decision alone, the panic at the thought of an evening apart. It isn’t devotion. Dependency is about the deprived one, not the beloved one. A man who cannot survive a weekend without his wife checking in every hour is not cherishing her — he is drowning quietly and calling the flailing romance.
Possessiveness is not cherishing. Possessiveness says, You are mine, and stops right there, as though ownership were the same transaction as adoration. It counts. It tracks. It gets jealous of a coworker’s harmless text and calls the jealousy love. Cherishing says something entirely different: You are yours, and I am endlessly, daily grateful that you’ve chosen to spend your one irreplaceable life partly in my company. One of those sentences is a cage. The other is a gift, offered freely, with the door left open the whole time.
Idealization is not cherishing. Idealization falls for a photograph instead of a person — the polished version that exists before you’ve seen them cry over something small, before you’ve seen them at their worst on a bad Tuesday in February, before the illusion meets the actual, breathing human being who snores and forgets things and gets petty sometimes when they’re overtired. Cherishing happens after all of that. It survives contact with the real, unedited person and somehow finds them more remarkable for it, not less — the way a favorite old coat becomes more precious, not less, once it’s been worn through a hundred ordinary days.
Infatuation is not cherishing. Infatuation is chemistry with an expiration date, usually somewhere between eighteen months and three years, according to the researchers who study such things. It is thrilling, and it is real, and I would never tell you to distrust the way it feels while it lasts — but it is not a discipline, and cherishing is. Infatuation fades whether you tend to it or not; it operates entirely outside your control, like a fever. Cherishing only grows if you tend it, and only shrinks if you neglect it. That distinction alone should tell you which one you can actually build a life on.
And obligation is not cherishing. Obligation stays because leaving would be inconvenient, or costly, or shameful, or would require an uncomfortable conversation with the in-laws. Cherishing stays because leaving is unthinkable — not because the door is locked from the outside, but because nobody in the room wants it open in the first place.
So what is cherishing, once you’ve cleared all five of those pretenders out of the way and you’re finally looking at the real thing?
It’s delight — the simple, renewable pleasure of a person’s company that doesn’t require them to perform for it, doesn’t require them to be witty or accomplished or freshly showered. It’s attentiveness — actually noticing the person standing in front of you today, instead of the person you married in some earlier year, or the person you’ve simply assumed, out of exhaustion, they still are. It’s gratitude — the daily, unglamorous habit of registering what you have instead of scanning, constantly, for what’s still missing. It’s emotional generosity — giving warmth before it’s earned, giving the benefit of the doubt before it’s even requested, the way you’d extend credit to someone whose word has always been good. It’s reverence — treating another person’s inner life as something endlessly worth being curious about, not a subject you finished studying back in year three. And it’s intentional care — small actions, chosen on purpose, that say without a single word being spoken: I see you, and I am tending to you, and I intend to keep doing this.
People who are cherished this way do something I have watched happen again and again, both in my office and in my own life: they flourish. Their shoulders drop half an inch. Their sense of humor comes back, the version of it that had gone quiet somewhere in the exhausted middle years. They take risks they would never have taken alone, because somewhere behind them stands a person who is actively rooting for the risk to work out, who will be there regardless of how it lands. Cherished people are not spoiled, as some cynics like to suggest — they are, paradoxically, some of the most generous people you will ever meet, because it is very hard to be stingy with love when you are already swimming in more of it than you know what to do with.
The Psychology of Feeling Cherished
I want to take you, briefly, into the research — not because I think you need a study to know when you’re loved well, your body has always known that without any help from a journal article, but because it’s worth understanding why your nervous system responds the way it does when someone cherishes you, and why it quietly collapses when they don’t.
Attachment researchers have spent decades documenting something that will not surprise you but is worth saying plainly: human beings regulate their nervous systems in relationship to the people closest to them. This is called co-regulation, and it means, quite literally, that a cherished person’s stress hormones behave differently over the course of an ordinary day than an unloved person’s do. Feeling safe with someone is not a metaphor, not a sentimental turn of phrase. It is a physiological state, measurable in cortisol levels, in heart-rate variability, in how quickly the body returns to baseline after a hard afternoon at work. Your body keeps score long before your mind admits there’s anything to keep score of.
There’s a concept psychologists call perceived partner responsiveness — the felt sense that someone actually sees you, actually understands what they’re seeing, and adjusts their behavior in response to genuinely caring about your wellbeing. This single variable, more than romantic gestures, more than sexual chemistry, more than shared hobbies or matching values, predicts relationship satisfaction and longevity better than almost anything else researchers have ever managed to measure. In plain English: it’s not that they love you. Plenty of people love someone and still leave them lonely. It’s that you can feel them noticing, in real time, without having to ask.
Then there’s capitalization research — a fascinating body of work studying what happens in relationships specifically when good things occur. It turns out the way a partner responds to your good news matters enormously more than how they respond to your bad news, which is the opposite of what most couples assume when they’re troubleshooting their marriage. A partner who lights up when you tell them something wonderful — who asks follow-up questions, who wants the details, who lets your joy become genuinely their joy too instead of offering a distracted “that’s great, honey” — is building intimacy faster than almost any grand gesture could manage. Cherishing shows up first, and most tellingly, in how someone reacts to your small victories, long before it ever shows up in how they handle your crises.
Emotional validation, affectionate communication, the slow accumulation of small daily gratitudes — all of it feeds something researchers call positive sentiment override, a state in which a couple has banked such a reserve of goodwill that they instinctively interpret each other charitably even in the middle of conflict. A snippy comment from a cherished spouse gets read as “they’re having a rough day, this isn’t really about me.” The identical comment, word for word, from an under-cherished spouse gets read as “they don’t respect me, this is who they really are.” Same six words. Entirely different marriage, depending entirely on the deposits that were made in the years before those six words were ever spoken.
What all of this adds up to is simple, even though the research underneath it fills entire journals: feeling cherished changes your nervous system. It lowers baseline stress in a way you can feel in your own shoulders. It increases resilience to setbacks that have nothing whatsoever to do with the relationship itself — the bad boss, the flat tire, the disappointing diagnosis. It makes emotional openness feel safe instead of dangerous, which is the only real precondition for genuine intimacy; nobody opens up to a person who might use it against them later. And it builds trust — not the naive kind that hasn’t been tested yet, but the earned kind, the kind that comes from a thousand small proofs stacked one on top of another until you simply know, in your body, before your mind even finishes the thought, that this particular person is safe to be fully yourself around.
You don’t need a doctorate to put any of this to use. You just need to know that every small act of cherishing you offer another person is quite literally rewiring how safe their body feels in the world, one small deposit at a time. That is not a small thing to be able to give someone. In a lot of ways, once you understand what it’s actually doing beneath the surface, it might be the largest thing.
The Thousand Tiny Things
Here is where I want to slow all the way down, because this is the heart of everything I am trying to tell you in this entire chapter.
Cherishing does not usually look like anything you’d photograph, and it almost never makes it into the anniversary toast. It looks like a man noticing, without being told a single word about it, that his wife has been quietly exhausted for three days running, and simply taking the kids to the park on Saturday morning so she can sleep past seven for the first time in a month. Nobody frames that. It looks like a woman who remembers that her husband’s stomach turns at the smell of cilantro, and who has, quietly, invisibly, never once served it in eleven years of marriage — not because she read it on a card, but because she was paying attention the one time he mentioned it in passing back in 2013 and she simply never forgot. Nobody claps for that either. Nobody ever will. It happens anyway, because that is exactly what cherishing is — love with no audience, performed for a house of one.
It’s the coffee made exactly the way the other person likes it, set down without comment or fanfare, before they’ve even fully asked for it. It’s reaching for a hand crossing a parking lot, not because anyone is watching, not because the moment calls for it, but because the hand was there and reaching for it is simply, by now, what you do. It’s the kiss for no occasion at all — not the anniversary kiss, not the goodbye-at-the-door kiss everyone expects, but the one that happens because you walked past them in the kitchen on your way to somewhere else entirely and some part of you simply couldn’t not stop.
It’s admiration spoken out loud instead of only felt privately and never mentioned. It’s the private joke that’s twelve years old and still, somehow, makes you both laugh so hard you can’t breathe, even though not one other person on this earth would find it remotely funny, because it was never about the joke itself — it’s about the shared archive standing behind it, all the years the two of you have quietly filed away together. It’s inside language: the nicknames, the invented words, the shorthand two people build the way birds build nests, twig by twig, over years, until the whole structure is unmistakably, irreplaceably theirs alone.
It’s checking in — a text in the middle of a hard day that says nothing more elaborate than “thinking about you,” no explanation attached, which somehow manages to say everything that needed saying. It’s bringing something small home, not a gift exactly, nothing that would show up wrapped — just the good bread from the bakery she mentioned once, or the specific brand of pen he can never seem to find anywhere, because you happened to be out, and you happened to think of him, and thinking of him turned, without any planning at all, into a small detour through the store.
It’s making someone’s day marginally easier without being asked to — filling the car with gas the night before a long drive so they don’t have to think about it at six in the morning, laying out the coffee filter before bed, quietly handling the phone call neither of you wanted to make so the other one doesn’t have to carry it. It’s remembering details other people would let slip through their fingers: the name of the coworker who’s been driving her slowly out of her mind, the anniversary of the dog they lost eight years ago and still quietly grieve every October, the specific way he takes his steak, the fact that she has never once, in her whole life, been able to sleep with socks on.
It’s celebrating ordinary victories with precisely the same enthusiasm you’d bring to the extraordinary ones — the parking spot found on the first try, the difficult email finally sent, the unexpectedly good haircut. It’s listening the entire way through a story, without already composing your reply in your head halfway through, without checking the time on your phone, without silently wishing the story were shorter than it is. It’s protecting someone’s peace — running quiet interference with the difficult in-law before dinner even starts, absorbing the bad news first so you can deliver it to them more gently, standing without announcement between the person you love and whatever is currently trying to take something from them.
It’s saying thank you for things that have technically, by now, become someone’s job — thank you for making dinner, even on the four-thousandth night of dinners, even though nobody thanks the person who’s cooked four thousand dinners, which is exactly why it matters when you do. It’s expressing affection out loud, often, freely, rather than rationing it like a resource that might run out, because it isn’t scarce, because the entire miracle at the center of love is that it multiplies the more recklessly you spend it, rather than depleting the way money does.
None of these things cost a dollar. Almost none of them take longer than thirty seconds out of an already full day. And every single one of them is saying the exact same sentence in a slightly different dialect, translated a thousand different ways over the course of a marriage: I see you, specifically, as the particular person you are today, and I am paying attention to your particular life. That sentence, repeated ten thousand times across the span of decades, is what people actually mean when they say, at the end of it all, that they felt cherished. It was never the anniversary trip they were describing. It was always, somehow, the tea.
Men Long to Be Cherished Too
There’s a version of love men are handed constantly, and a version they almost never receive at all, and most men have gotten so used to going without the second one that they’ve quietly stopped believing it exists anywhere for someone like them.
The version they’re handed is appreciation — thank you for fixing the sink, thank you for the paycheck, thank you for being reliable when so many other things in life aren’t. It is warm, and it is genuine, and I don’t want to diminish it, but it is not the same thing as cherishing, and men know the difference in their bodies even when they can’t quite name it out loud. Appreciation says, You did something useful for me. Cherishing says something entirely separate: I delight in who you are, apart from anything at all you’ve done for me today, apart from your usefulness, apart from your function in this household.
I have sat with enough men in my office over twenty years to tell you something that will surprise the people who’ve bought fully into the myth of the emotionally indifferent man: men long, quietly and constantly, underneath whatever they present to the world, to be noticed. Not just seen doing something useful — noticed, as a person. A man wants to walk into a room after a long day and watch his wife’s face actually change when she sees him, the way it did back in year one, instead of receiving the polite half-glance of someone simply checking who’s come home from work. He wants to be chosen — not married once, years ago, and quietly filed away as a settled matter, but chosen again, actively, the way you would choose a favorite thing each and every single day out of all the other things competing for your attention.
He longs for admiration, spoken rather than only ever assumed and never mentioned. Men carry an enormous amount without complaint, often without even naming it to themselves — they carry providing, protecting, fixing, absorbing the family’s worry so no one else has to hold it — and very few people ever stop, in the middle of an ordinary week, to say out loud, I admire how you carry all of that, I see the weight of it even when you don’t. He longs for tenderness, which is a different animal entirely from sex and a different animal from respect; tenderness is the hand resting on the back of his neck at the end of a long day, the forehead pressed against his shoulder for no reason, touch that asks absolutely nothing of him in return and simply says, without words, you are safe here, you can set it all down here.
He longs for a peaceful home to return to at the end of the day — not a perfect one, God knows, not a silent one either, but one where the general emotional weather is warm enough that walking through the front door feels like relief rather than another round of bracing for impact. He longs for a place he can be emotionally safe, where the tired parts of him, the uncertain parts, the frightened parts underneath all that competence, don’t have to stay hidden behind a closed door marked “handling it.”
Most men will never say any of this out loud, in so many words, not because they don’t feel it but because they were never given the vocabulary for it. Many of them were actively taught, as boys, to be quietly ashamed of wanting exactly these things. So the longing goes underground rather than disappearing. And I want to be clear about this: it doesn’t disappear. It just goes quiet, and it waits, sometimes for decades, patiently, for someone to finally offer it to him without his ever having had to ask.
The men who are cherished this way become almost unrecognizable from the men who aren’t. Something in them that had been braced for years — sometimes since boyhood — finally, visibly, exhales.
Women Long to Be Cherished Too
Everything I have just told you about men is equally true, in its own particular key, for women — and I want to say that plainly and without hedging, because cherishing only actually works when it runs in both directions at once.
A woman longs for emotional presence — not simply a partner in the same room, but a partner genuinely there, phone face-down, eyes up off the screen, attention actually landing on her instead of drifting somewhere over her shoulder toward the television or the next task on the list. She longs for consistency — not grand romantic gestures scattered unpredictably across the calendar, but the steady, dependable warmth of a person who shows up the same way on the boring Tuesdays as he did on the anniversary trip they took last spring. Consistency, far more than intensity, is what tells a woman’s nervous system, underneath everything else, that she is finally safe enough to relax her guard.
She longs for thoughtfulness — the small, accumulating evidence that she has been thought about even during the hours she wasn’t in the room, that some part of her lives, rent-free and entirely welcome, in his mind during an ordinary Tuesday at his office. She longs for safety, in every sense the word can hold: physical, financial, emotional, the quiet confidence that comes from knowing someone genuinely has her back even in the rooms she isn’t standing in.
She longs for affection offered freely rather than carefully rationed — the arm around her in public without a special occasion attached to it, the hand resting on the small of her back while they wait in line somewhere, touch that isn’t a prelude to anything else at all, just a way of saying, quietly, you’re mine and I like that you are. She longs for attention paid to the actual specifics of her — her shifting moods, her particular preferences, the different shape her exhaustion takes on a Thursday versus a Monday. She longs, simply, to be delighted in, the way you delight in something purely because it exists and because it happens to be yours to enjoy.
She longs for romance that doesn’t quietly retire itself the moment the wedding is officially over, and for curiosity — a partner who is still, after years and years, genuinely interested in who she’s becoming next, rather than one who assumed he’d finished learning her sometime back around year three and closed the file.
Notice how closely all of this mirrors what I told you men long for, sentence for sentence. Presence. Consistency. Tenderness. Being chosen, over and over. Emotional safety. This is not a coincidence, and it is not, contrary to what a hundred popular books will insist, evidence that men and women are secretly identical underneath. It’s evidence of something simpler, and honestly more hopeful than that: cherishing is a human need before it is ever a gendered one. Everybody, regardless of what they were quietly taught to want out loud growing up, is hoping, somewhere underneath the surface, to be adored on purpose by the person who chose them. The entire art of a great marriage, when you strip everything else away, is two people taking patient turns making absolutely sure the other one gets to feel it.
Cherishing Over Decades
Here is the part nobody warns you about at the wedding: cherishing is easy in year one, and it gets a little harder every single year after that — not because the person becomes any less worth cherishing, but because familiarity is a thief that works so slowly you never once catch it in the act of taking anything from you.
Here is how it happens. In the beginning, you notice absolutely everything — the way she laughs at her own jokes half a second before the punchline lands, the way he tells a story with his hands, the small specific gesture that means she’s nervous underneath her calm exterior. And then, somewhere around year four, or year eleven, or year twenty-two, you simply stop noticing, not out of any malice, but out of sheer accumulated repetition. The brain is built to conserve its energy, and it conserves that energy precisely by ending the search for new information about things it has already, in its own estimation, figured out completely. You stop seeing your actual spouse and start seeing your idea of your spouse instead, which is a much older, much less accurate document than the living, changing person standing in your kitchen.
Admiration, over time, becomes assumed instead of spoken. Routine — which used to feel indistinguishable from intimacy back in the early years — slowly starts to feel instead like drift, like two people occupying the same house on parallel but separate tracks. Couples wake up somewhere around year fifteen and say some version of the exact same sentence I have heard a thousand times sitting across from them in my office: We’re not fighting, we’re just not really here with each other anymore. That is not, whatever it feels like from the inside, a crisis of love. That is a crisis of attention, and attention, unlike love itself, is entirely and immediately recoverable, starting the very next morning if you choose it.
The extraordinary marriages — and I have had the genuine privilege, over twenty years, of watching a handful of them up close — do one thing noticeably differently from all the rest. They treat cherishing as an ongoing decision rather than a permanent achievement you complete once and then get to keep. They keep courting each other on purpose, decades in, the way you would court someone you were still actively trying to win over, because on some level they understand, correctly, that you are always still trying to win them, that the contest never officially ends just because the paperwork was signed. They build surprise into the relationship deliberately, on purpose, because predictability is comfortable but surprise is precisely what keeps a nervous system paying close attention to another person. They practice gratitude out loud, consistently, instead of only privately, because unspoken appreciation, however sincerely felt, might as well not exist at all to the person who never gets to hear it. They keep their admiration current, updating it regularly the way you’d update a subscription, instead of quietly running on some old version installed back in 2004. And they stay curious, treating their spouse as someone still becoming rather than someone long since finished — which is, when you actually stop to think about it, simply true. None of us are finished. Not at forty. Not at seventy. Not ever, not really, not until the very end.
The couples who manage to cherish each other across whole decades are not, contrary to what you might assume, the couples who somehow never drifted apart even a little. They are, without exception, the couples who kept catching the drift early, again and again, and kept quietly swimming back toward each other.
Love Is a Verb, Cherishing Is an Art
People rarely remember the expensive gift. I have heard this confirmed, in one form or another, more times than I could possibly count, from people describing marriages that lasted forty years, fifty years, sixty years and more. Ask someone what they remember most about being loved well across an entire lifetime, and they almost never say the ring, the trip, the car in the driveway with the bow on it. They say something far smaller, something you’d miss entirely if you weren’t specifically looking for it.
They remember how they were looked at — not glanced at, in passing, on the way to somewhere else, but truly looked at, the way you look at something you still can’t quite believe you get to keep. They remember how safe they felt, in the full and total sense of the word, the specific relief of never once wondering, in the middle of the night, whether the person lying beside them was genuinely, fully on their side. They remember how carefully they were loved — the attention paid to small details, the effort of getting it right, the small corrections made not out of criticism but purely out of care for the other person’s comfort. They remember how deeply they were known, which is an entirely different thing from how much they were adored, because being known means someone eventually saw every one of the unflattering parts too, and stayed anyway, and never once made them feel smaller for it. And they remember, more than almost anything else, how often they were chosen — not just once, at an altar, in front of witnesses, but daily, quietly, in a thousand ordinary rooms where absolutely nobody else on earth was watching to see whether they’d do it again.
Love is a feeling, and feelings, being feelings, come and go the way weather does, unpredictably, sometimes without warning, occasionally without any apparent cause at all. But cherishing is a verb, conjugated fresh every single day of a life together — I cherish, you cherished, we will cherish — and a verb, unlike a feeling, does not require you to feel a particular way before you’re allowed to act. It only asks that you act, consistently, on the days you feel it and on the days you very much don’t, and it trusts, correctly, that the feeling itself, given enough patient repetition, will eventually follow the action home, the way warmth follows a fire someone bothered to build.
I think about the tea again — the man at the stove at six-fifteen in the morning, humming his tuneless private song, honey stirred in before the milk because that is how she likes it and he has never once forgotten. He will never think of that particular morning as significant. He will very likely forget the whole thing by lunchtime, on to the next task, the next small errand of an ordinary day. But somewhere far down the road, decades from this morning, she will be an old woman telling someone about her marriage, about the whole long shape of it, and she will not describe the wedding first, or the vows, or even the words I love you, spoken however many thousands of times over the years. She will describe a kitchen, early morning light coming through a window, and a man’s back at the stove, and the small, unglamorous, entirely unphotographed fact that for forty straight years, without ever once being asked, someone made absolutely certain the honey went in first.
That is the whole art, when you finally strip everything else away from it. That is the entire sacred, unspectacular, quietly world-altering art of cherishing another person — a thousand mornings nobody will ever film, nobody will ever toast to at a party, each one of them saying, in its own small dialect, the very same enduring sentence: I see you, I choose you again today, and I am not finished paying attention to you yet, and I never intend to be.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Chapter Companion Song Recommendation:
— You Are So Beautiful, Joe Cocker 1974
This article is an excerpt from Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.’s forthcoming book Magnificent Men: How Men Are Undervalued and How Worshipping and Being Worshipped Can Bring You The Hot and Holy Love You Desire, exploring the restoration of men’s dignity and worth, the sacred and sensual dimensions of intimacy, and hot and holy love.
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Author Bio
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D. is a best-selling author, psychotherapist, and leading expert in counseling, communication, and human connection. Her first published study, released in 1993, explored the impact of family dysfunction on intimacy and communication in adult relationships. For more than three decades, she has developed innovative therapeutic models to help individuals and couples create deeper connection, emotional resilience, and extraordinary relationships. Her work explores the intersection of psychology, spirituality, humor, eroticism, and human magnificence, helping people live more fully, love more deeply, and embrace the extraordinary possibilities of a beautiful life.
