On any given date night with my wife, she might take me to a restaurant with comfortable enough seating for my achy body, order me something from the menu that she knows I’ll love, accompany me to a comedy show that’ll leave me wheezing with laughter, and then bring me home and fuck me in my favorite ways. All of this demonstrates the truest thing I know about love: that the height of romance is knowing what someone likes and then giving it to them. Over and over, day after day. Whenever you can.

The more that I think about it, the more I see this as the foundational act of connection, the base unit we stack together like bricks to build what we call love. And not just romantic love, either – this is the stuff of strong family relationships and friendships, too: remembering someone’s preferences and then enacting them. Occasionally a friend will do or say something that makes me proclaim, before I even realize what’s coming out of my mouth, “That’s so romantic!” even if our relationship is fully platonic – and it’s always because they’ve remembered something pertinent about me and deployed that knowledge in a way that touched my heart.

I thought about this principle earlier this week, when (not to brag but…) my wife went down on me so well that I came that way twice in one day, which is very unusual for me. Somehow her technique has levelled up recently, despite us having been together for over eight years. She is always looking for ways to give me more pleasure and joy, both in and out of the bedroom. Whenever I notice her integrating new knowledge of me to improve my experience of anything, from sex to jokes to cocktails, I find it both blazingly hot and deeply romantic. It conveys simultaneously that she is smart enough to notice what I need, and that she loves me enough to give it to me. I can’t imagine what could possibly be sexier or more comforting than that.

But, as I said, this principle holds true across the platonic realm as well: it is nice to be demonstrably known. You don’t even have to do it in a mysterious way. A friend recently asked me what my favorite snack is, because my birthday is coming up and she wanted to get me something. In no way did it diminish my delight that she directly told me this, instead of trying to intuit my tastes and surprise me with something. Love was conveyed by the act itself, and that love (cheesy though this may be) is the real gift, the real joy being felt by both people when a gift like that is given.

I think some people beat themselves up about not being able to remember loved ones’ preferences, because we are so often told that remembering these things is what conveys love. Certainly there are things I hope and expect people in my life to remember, but it’s rarely vital that they keep all of that information in their own brain – it often works just as well if they store that info in a note on their phone, or whatever other system works for them. The point, after all, is not that you remembered, but that you cared to do so. You filed away that knowledge somewhere – whether in your own mind or in the cloud – because the person it pertains to is important to you. It’s the denoting of that importance, and the acting on it, that can communicate how you feel.

It’s a simple principle, but it’s one that informs many of my relationships. It’s the reason I keep notes on my partners’ and close friends’ favorite authors and colors and ingredients. It’s the reason I can sometimes be just as touched by someone sending a meme (“Thought you’d enjoy this!”) as I would be by someone sending flowers. And it’s the reason that good oral sex sometimes makes me cry: every familiar tongue motion and consistent climax is an act of attention, of intention, of caring about a fellow human being.