Are you even in love if you and your partner haven’t had a half-shouted conversation about the relative merits of grated vs sliced cheese through a toilet door as one of you tries to enjoy a quiet shit? Is it even a relationship if you don’t share a razor, socks, a rucksack and the occasional towel? Can you call yourself partners if you haven’t yet got a personal, incomprehensible nickname for the boiler, television remote or kitchen blender?

Popular culture, literary fiction, love songs and television drama have, for decades, been enthralled by the drama and anticipation of falling in love. We have films, books, songs and poems without number that scour the landscape of unrequited love, passionate romance, thwarted lust and hungry adoration. But what of that other love? The one that settles across two potato-shaped bodies after seven, 15, 30 of co-existence? What about the love that is expressed in cups of tea and help getting onto a train, instead of motorbike rides and topless dancing in the rain? What of inherited cousins and notes on the fridge, umbrellas, council tax, toe hair and having a specific side of the bed? What of the love that the poet Larkin once called “a skilled, vigilant, flexible, unemphasised, enthralled catching of happiness”? This is the love that butters your parsnips, brings home babies, paints the hallway ceiling and learns how to operate the boiler so you don’t have to. That is, probably, the love that most of us really aspire to.