March 26th, 2026
A friend of mine tells his wife "happy birthday" every single morning. Not just on the day she was born. Every day. He's done it for over fifty years of marriage. No fanfare, no grand gesture. Just those two words, spoken quietly, usually over coffee, before the world starts making its demands.
When I asked him why, he said something I've never forgotten: "Because I want her to know that every day she's alive is worth celebrating to me."
I've been thinking about that lately.
I've also been watching the Paramount+ series The Madison, which does something few shows have the courage to do. It doesn't romanticize loss from a safe distance. It puts you inside it. It shows, with an almost brutal honesty, how the person sitting across from you at breakfast, the one you sometimes barely notice because the morning routine has worn a groove so deep you could walk it blindfolded... that person is irreplaceable. And you may not fully understand that until the chair is empty.
It's a hard thing to watch. And a harder thing to sit with afterward.
But here's what I've come to believe. Love doesn't ask us to wait for tragedy to teach us what matters. It asks us, gently and persistently, to pay attention now. And the couples who seem to understand this best are the ones who've found their own quiet symbols, small rituals of devotion that say, without saying, I see you. I choose you. Still.
I once read about a man in Vermont who, every snowfall, would carry his wife's boots to the fireplace and warm them before she woke. He did this for decades. She told the story at his funeral and said she never once asked him to. He just understood that cold feet bothered her, and that love is sometimes nothing more than remembering what someone else would rather not have to say out loud.
There's a couple in their eighties, married sixty-one years, who still write each other one-line notes and leave them folded on the kitchen counter. Not love letters. Just observations. "The way you laughed at dinner last night reminded me of our first date." Or sometimes just: "Thank you for today." Sixty-one years of paper, piling up like evidence.
A woman I read about sets an alarm on her phone every afternoon at 3:15, the exact minute she and her husband first spoke. When it goes off, she pauses whatever she's doing and sends him three words. Not "I love you," though she means that too. She sends, "I'm glad today." That's it. And he knows exactly what it means.
These aren't grand gestures. Nobody's hiring a skywriter or filling a room with ten thousand roses. These are the things that cost almost nothing and mean almost everything, because
they are given without being asked for, and repeated without being required.
Lucy Maud Montgomery once wrote that it is not the great things in life that matter most but the little things made great by love. I think she had it exactly right. Love, at its finest, is not a single breathtaking moment. It is a pattern. A rhythm. A promise renewed so often it becomes part of the air between two people.
The danger, of course, is that we forget. We get busy. We get comfortable. We start to assume that the person beside us already knows how we feel, so what's the point of saying it again?
But that man with the birthday greeting understood something most of us learn too late, if we learn it at all. Love is not a thing you declare once and file away. It is a thing you practice. Daily. Quietly. With boots by the fireplace and folded notes on the counter and two whispered words over morning coffee that say, in the most ordinary and extraordinary way possible: You matter to me. Today. Again. Still.
Don't wait for the empty chair to teach you that.
