Relationships, relationships, relationships. The whole world is preoccupied with them. Everyone wants one. Everyone comes in the morning to the universal post office and asks the clerk whether the relationship they ordered last month has arrived yet.
Because everyone is looking for love. A legitimate aspiration, perhaps, but it seems to me more sensible to try to manufacture it.
And how do you manufacture love? Good question. Remember I mentioned caring at the start? Here is a point for consideration, at no extra cost. Caring is a decisive component of love that is preserved over time.
Now, it is not right for me to throw hollow buzzwords into the air like "be caring" without explaining what I mean.
Here is a definition. Caring is composed, in my humble opinion, of three lovely and essential elements.
One. The other person interests you a great deal.
Two. What happens in the other person's life matters to you.
Three. You are prepared to do many things in order to help the other person and ease the burden of life for them, in small ways and large.
A thought has frequently risen in my feverish brain — not very brilliant and not very original, I must admit — that if we related to our partners the way we relate to our children, the world would be crammed with harmonious marriages and couples therapists would be queuing to sign on for unemployment.
Because where your children are concerned, you care enormously. You care most of all.
Many parents grumble that they are effectively employed by their children. And honestly, they are right.
An enormous slice of parents' physical and mental activity is devoted to their offspring. Whether directly — thinking during the day about what is happening with them and how to spend the weekend with them — or indirectly, in the thousand small calculations that run underneath everything else.
Now notice what you do not do for your partner. You do not wonder how their day went before they tell you. You do not adjust the evening around what you noticed in their face.
That is the entire difference, and it is not a feeling. It is a set of behaviours, which means it is available to you tonight.