What If the Boring Years Are the Love Story?

Interesting question, right?

The movies mostly ignore them. Books tend to skip over them, too.

And maybe that's part of the reason we sometimes have such a skewed idea of what love is supposed to look like.

Because the most important parts of love are often the most boring.

Lost love letters spanning decades are touching. Racing through an airport before someone gets on a plane is exciting. Bursting through the doors of a church to stop a wedding and declare your undying love? That's the stuff stories are made of.

But stopping at the store on your way home because you know someone's had a bad day and their favorite candy might make it a little better?

That's not exactly going to sell movie tickets.

In fact, somewhere along the way, we've started calling things like that the "bare minimum."

But isn't life mostly made up of our imagined standard of "bare minimum"?

It's making the coffee.

Picking up the prescription.

Cooking dinner when you're both tired.

Remembering which snack they like and which one they don't.

It's a hug in the kitchen while you're waiting for the water to boil. A text asking if you made it there safely. Filling the gas tank because you noticed it was almost empty. Letting them have the better pillow without ever announcing that you did.

Tiny, ordinary things that would look like absolutely nothing to anyone else.

Except they aren't nothing.

Because every one of them says the same thing:

*I thought about you when you weren't there.*

And maybe that's one of the most romantic things we can ever say to another person.

Five minutes spent buying someone's favorite candy may not sound as romantic as five minutes spent writing them a love poem, but I'm not sure one should be worth more than the other.

Both say, *You matter enough for me to stop.*

Even as I type this, the romance writer in me knows I'm probably never going to write a book where the big climactic scene is a husband walking through the door with a Snickers bar.

Let's be honest. It wouldn't sell.

But maybe that's exactly why those moments deserve to find their way into our stories anyway.

Because the little things don't just make love sweeter.

They build it.

There's an old demonstration where someone fills a jar with large stones and asks a group of people if the jar is full.

Everyone says yes.

Then they pour smaller pebbles into the jar, and the pebbles tumble into all the spaces between the stones.

Now is it full?

Surely.

Until they pour in sand.

The sand works its way into every tiny crevice the stones and pebbles couldn't reach, filling spaces you didn't even realize were there.

I've been thinking that maybe love works a little like that.

The grand gestures are the big stones. The proposals. The anniversaries. The trips. The celebrations. The moments we photograph and post and remember forever.

The special moments are the pebbles. Date nights. Unexpected flowers. Long conversations. The times someone goes out of their way to make an ordinary day feel special.

But the sand?

That's everyday love.

It's the cooked meals and kitchen hugs. The inside jokes and sleepy goodnights. It's taking out the garbage and warming up the car. It's knowing the exact look on someone's face when something is wrong. It's grabbing their favorite candy simply because you saw it and thought of them.

None of those moments seem big enough to build a love story around.

But maybe we've had it backward all along.

Maybe the big moments don't hold a love story together.

Maybe they're simply the moments we notice.

The sand is what fills everything else.

And after enough years together, you begin to realize that a great love story isn't necessarily made of dramatic declarations, airport chases and grand romantic gestures.

Sometimes it's two people standing in a kitchen on an otherwise forgettable Tuesday, talking about absolutely nothing while dinner cooks.

Sometimes it's a candy bar sitting on the counter.

Sometimes it's someone knowing exactly how you take your coffee.

And maybe the years we call "boring" aren't the years between the good parts of the love story.

Maybe they are the love story.