The Towel
Standard Sunday evening.
My husband’s in the bedroom ironing his clothes for the week ahead — always organised, always ready before Monday’s even arrived.
Meanwhile I’m in the shower, and as I turn the water off I realise, in true ADHD style, that I’ve forgotten to bring a towel in with me.
Again.
It’s practically my shower ritual at this point.
Get in shower. Wash hair. Turn shower off. Realise towel is somewhere other than the bathroom.
So I call through to him.
“Can you bring me a towel?”
He appears with a lovely fluffy clean one and, as I step out of the shower, wraps me straight up in it.
Then he starts patting me dry — arms, shoulders, back — with a quick cheeky squeeze along the way because he can never resist one, and he knows a cheeky grope is one of my many love languages.
Then another towel goes over my head while he gives my hair a rub too.
As he walks off, he says,
“I’m not picking you up, carrying you to bed and wrestling you like I do the kids.”
I laugh because it’s true.
Bath night with the girls is exactly that.
You can hear the laughter from downstairs, usually loud enough that one of them ends up needing her asthma spray because she’s laughed so hard.
But in those few little moments — the towel, the patting down, the cheeky squeeze, the joke as he walked away — there was something properly lovely between us.
Care.
Affection.
And that particular kind of love that comes wrapped up in mild annoyance and a towel thrown slightly too enthusiastically over your head.
It felt like being looked after.
It felt exactly like being loved.
Nobody ever tells you these are the moments that will feel like love.
Films, books and television teach us to look for grand declarations. Flowers. Airport reunions. Surprise weekends away. Someone standing in the rain telling you they can’t live without you.
And those things can be lovely.
But after years together, I think love becomes much stranger and much smaller.
It becomes knowing your wife will almost certainly forget the towel.
It becomes bringing one anyway.
And then making her laugh while you dry her off.
