“Well, all of the stuff I did today will become tomorrow’s chip paper”. That’s what I said to her tonight as I sat down, spent from the day. The hours had been filled with errands, cycling miles to collect her car from the garage, touching up the scruffed bumper on her car, washing folded, tea made, bills covered, and a hundred other invisible actions stitched together under the simple word love.

And yet, isn’t this the truest love of all?

The Highlight Reel Illusion

We live in an age that rewards spectacle. Scroll through Instagram and you’ll see love dressed up for the camera: anniversary dinners, sunsets caught at just the right filter, carefully curated smiles of people who want to be seen as in love.

But the endless highlight reel leaves something out. It strips away the dailiness that real love requires—the early starts, the compromises, the heavy bags carried upstairs, the dog poo picked up in the rain.

Why don’t we photograph those? Why don’t we store endless albums of breakfasts on a tray delivered each morning in bed, packed lunches made, socks folded, toilets scrubbed, the ironing board pulled out for the hundredth time?

Maybe because it would look absurd. Maybe because it wouldn’t gain likes. Maybe because it reminds us that love is less about fireworks and more about keeping the fire going on the hearth every single day.

Here’s the provocation: the highlight reel is a lie. It tricks us into believing that love is about moments, when in fact it is about motion—the rolling, unending tide of care. Tiny, unglamorous acts that disappear into one another.

The Unseen Ledger

When people look back at their lives in old age, what will they remember? The big days, yes—but not only. The ledger of love is written in invisible ink. It is counted in early mornings, in errands run, in the silent decision to let someone else sleep in while you shoulder the work. It is counted in hours lost waiting in hospital corridors, in afternoons given up to drive someone to an appointment, in the constant vigilance of care.

No one claps for those moments. They don’t make it into photo albums or anniversary speeches. But take them away and see how quickly love unravels.

The Instagrammable version of love is fragile. It wilts if it is not fed by the ordinary and the everyday. And yet our society weighs the ordinary as if it were worthless. We measure relationships in milestones and ignore the scaffolding that holds them up.

The Disposable Paradox

Here is the paradox: what is most disposable is also most essential. Tomorrow’s chip paper is what sustains us. The meals cooked, the bills paid, the laundry folded—none of it lasts, but without it nothing else can stand.

It’s almost obscene, really, the way culture has twisted this. We elevate the performative, the visible, the public, and treat the quiet labour of love as if it were beneath notice. We end up in marriages and partnerships where one person burns out under the weight of the unseen while the other remains hungry for the fireworks. We end up in a society where mental health collapses under the strain of people working, producing, performing—without ever being able to slow down and say: this, too, is sacred.

A Different Kind of Archive

I sometimes wonder what it would look like to reverse this—to make a year’s record not of holidays and dinners out, but of every sandwich buttered, every item of clothing ironed, every dog walk, every school run, every errand. To build an archive of the daily liturgy of love.

It would look absurd at first, endless rows of banal images: a thousand cups of tea, socks lined up, receipts from the petrol station, wet towels on radiators. But by the end, wouldn’t it be more honest than the glossy highlight reel? Wouldn’t it reveal the shape of love far more clearly?

Because here’s the truth: the ordinary is the extraordinary. A thousand invisible acts add up to something more lasting than the one staged photograph that gets a hundred likes.

Choosing the Deeper Vision

Tonight, as I looked out the window and saw the rain falling like stair rods, I thought: I could see this as depressing. A grim walk to the doctor under grey skies. Or I could see it as life-giving. Every drop of water is the same rain that fills rivers, feeds crops, sustains the soil. To walk in the rain is to walk in the gift of life itself.

The same choice stands before us in love. We can choose to see our days as a burden of repetitive chores, as meaningless errands that vanish into chip paper. Or we can choose the deeper vision—that each act is an offering, each ordinary moment a building block of a life shared.

We do not need more highlights. We need more reverence for the unlit hours, the days that go unmarked, the rainy dog walks and the ironing boards.

Love is written in invisible ink, the ink of actions often unnoticed and rarely ever recorded.