Affirmation & Encouragement
Dear Hobbit,
This breakfast is brought to you by the simple joy you bubbled inside me
by making sure I woke to a clean and empty sink.
Dear Owly,
You bring electricity of deep care into your words and food.
Your words are food. I love eating your words and munching on your mindfulness.
Dear Hobbit,
You enhance everything about my morning routine,
which then spills into full enhancement of everything else in my world.
Dear Owly,
The ping pong back and forth of our love logic is a natural and playful bounce.
Dear Hobbit,
Chores are not chores.
They are little ways we make each other happy.
The story here is a simple one.
One morning, while I showered, Hobbit washed the dishes from the previous night’s dinner. He didn’t just wash them and leave them to drain in the sink, he put them away, leaving me an empty sink and clean kitchen.
At the time, he didn’t know that a clean and empty sink before I start cooking is one of my simple pleasures in life.
A dopamine response was triggered.
And a ping-pong volley of love commenced.
When Hobbit returned from work, he once again did the dishes, leaving the sink clean and empty before I started cooking dinner.
Assuming each message took about 30 seconds to read and enjoy, and another 30 seconds to write and send, the whole exchange probably took each of us about 2-3 minutes out of our day. Not only did one message trigger three more, each one brought a multitude of happy-love feelings.
The moral of the story is that a little affirmation goes a very long way.
I affirmed Hobbit for doing something as simple as the dishes.
He gushed gratitude back, and affirmed me for my food and words.
I geisered gratitude back.
The true magic isn’t even in the little doses of love hormone, but more in the long-term effects that resulted from this four-message exchange.
Four years later, Hobbit still makes a point of giving me a clean and empty sink, and doing so isn’t a chore, but a pleasure.
And, I make a point of gushing gratitude in response.
Morning Messages - Our Form of Love Notes
We call them Morning Messages because they started as “Good morning ~ I’m thinking of you” texts; however, they quickly evolved to little love-notes that happen randomly, at any time of the day, and in surprise spaces around the house.
Even though we now both live and work from home, we still find ways to compose Morning Messages to each other when we are apart, even if “apart” means simply being in a different room of the house.
“With you, I feel enormously accepted
in all my absurdities
and eccentricities
and oddwhats.
Affirmation is a Dopamine Rush
The thing about dopamine is that when we get a tiny taste of this hormone, we want more, and more, and more. That’s how dopamine works. We become addicts to the natural high, searching for ways to recreate and one-up the pleasure. Morning messages are a ping pong game of dopamine.
The simple act of affirming and encouraging your partner
is to strengthen the heart, or to strengthen the love.
The word AFFIRMATION comes from the Latin word affirmare
which means to strengthen.
The word ENCOURAGEMENT comes from the Old French encoragier
which means make strong, hearten.
For Hobbit and me, affirming and encouraging each other is the daily bread that our love needs to stay nourished and thrive.
While they started as mostly text exchanges, our Morning Messages have taken other forms. While post-its and text messages are the convenient go-to’s, Hobbit has taken morning messaging to new levels with creative delivery methods.
Sometimes the method of delivery has more impact than the message itself.
bananas in our household are rarely eaten before they’ve been tattooed with a heartfelt ink squiggle.
two antique store price tags inked with morning messages dangling from a lampshade
a clean laundry pile waiting to be folded formed into the shape of a heart
Dove chocolate candy tinfoil wrapping inspirational message tucked inside the pages of a book to be discovered whenever that page gets turned
poor rhymes of poems on paper towels and re-rolled the roll to hide the note until that towel is reached.
The simple one-or-two-word notes left in unique hide-and-seek places often say “I’m thinking of you” better than any carefully crafted lunch napkin haiku.
A morning message is so much more than just a love note.
These simple and tiny expressions of affirmation and encouragement can appear anywhere in our shared space. They are like little alien spaceships that visit unexpectedly with words that are filled with the tender-sweet nougat of joy.