"Love you!"

There’s a modern ritual I can’t help noticing, and it happens most often when younger married couples are on the phone. The conversation itself is mundane – bins, petrol, what’s for dinner. Nothing of note. But then comes the big finale: “Love you.” Without fail, the reply bounces back – “Love you.” Then the line goes dead. It’s as if neither dares risk the other hanging up first without the magic words.

Hay and I find it faintly comic. We’ve been married long enough to know that love doesn’t dissolve the instant you put down the receiver. You don’t need to treat marriage like a houseplant, watering it every few hours with a verbal sprinkle. The vows, the mortgage, the joint bank account – those are the evidence. Saying “love you” after a reminder to defrost the mince adds nothing.

My parents never did it. Nor did most of their generation. They seemed to regard love as something permanent – lived, not endlessly narrated. If they ended a call at all, it was with a brisk “right then” or “cheerio.” The love was assumed. Solid. Unspoken.

What jars most is the performative element. “Love you” as a sign-off has all the depth of a car alarm beep – it’s not there to express emotion, it’s there to confirm the system’s still working. Once or twice it’s tender. Repeated mechanically, it becomes the linguistic equivalent of double-locking the front door out of habit. A ritual born of insecurity.

And then there’s its daytime cousin: “babes.” Some couples can’t get through a supermarket shop without firing it back and forth like a game of ping-pong. “Babes, do we need milk?” “Yes, babes, get two.” “Thanks, babes.” One “babes” might be affectionate. Fifty “babes” between the fruit aisle and the checkout makes you wonder if either can remember the name on the marriage certificate. It’s affectionate in theory, but in practice it’s punctuation – a verbal filler that ends up meaning nothing at all.

If there’s one thing that experience teaches you, it’s that constant verbal reassurance doesn’t hold a marriage together. Actions do. The commitment is proven in the living – through patience, graft, and the occasional row patched up, not through a reflexive “love you” at the end of a phone call, or a volley of “babes” in Tesco.

The irony is that the more these words are repeated, the less they mean. Declarations that should be rare and precious are reduced to the conversational wallpaper of daily life. Marriage is a commitment. It isn’t a catchphrase.