Why Love Is Mostly Doing The Dishes

I was standing at the sink last night, staring at a lasagna pan that had achieved a level of crustiness usually reserved for geological formations. I didn’t want to scrub it.

Nobody wants to scrub the lasagna pan.

It’s mundane, it’s wet, and it feels entirely beneath the dignity of a mind capable of pondering the cosmos.

But as I stood there, elbow-deep in lukewarm suds, I started thinking about rust. And weeds. And how, if I walked away from this house for ten years, nature wouldn’t pause out of respect for my mortgage payments. The roof would leak, the vines would crack the foundation, and dust would bury the furniture.

The universe, you see, has a relentless, heavy bias toward falling apart.

Physicists call it entropy - the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It’s the scientific way of saying that disorder is the default setting. Chaos is the baseline.

Order... well, order is an act of rebellion.

And I think we’ve forgotten that. We live in a culture absolutely drunk on “The Start.” We worship the breakthrough, the launch, the disruption, the first date, the ribbon-cutting ceremony. We love the spark because the spark is free. It’s pure dopamine.

But sparks don’t keep the lights on.

I still drive an old truck. It’s got enough mileage on it to get to the moon, and maybe part of the way back. People ask how it’s still running, assuming I have some secret mechanic or I just got a “good one.” But the truth is boring. It’s painfully unsexy.

It’s running because every few thousand kilometers, I change the oil.

I check the fluids.

I tighten a belt that’s started to squeal.

That truck didn’t survive because of a grand gesture. It survived because of a ritual.

We treat our lives like we’re waiting for a miracle, when what we really need is maintenance. We think love is the grand romantic gesture - the boombox outside the window or the surprise trip to Paris. And sure, those are nice.

But relationships don’t die from a lack of trips to Paris. They die from the slow, creeping rust of unsaid resentments, the missed oil changes of “how was your day,” and the refusal to do the dishes when the other person is too tired to stand.

Maintenance is the highest form of care because it is the most invisible form of care.

Nobody claps when you fix the leak before it floods the basement. Nobody gives you a Nobel Prize for forgiving your partner for being irritable on a Tuesday. There is no glory in the grind of keeping things from falling apart.

But that is where the life is.

If you stop rowing, the boat doesn’t stay still; it drifts downstream. The garden doesn’t stay paused; the weeds take the throat of the roses. Peace of mind isn’t a mountain top you reach once and set up camp; it’s a muscle you have to stretch every morning, or it stiffens up.

So, I scrubbed the pan. It took ten minutes. It wasn’t profound, and yet, it was everything.

It was me telling the universe, “Not today, chaos. Not today.”

Love, whether for a person, a career, or your own chaotic mind, is mostly just doing the dishes.

It’s the repetitive, sacred, boring act of tightening the screws. Over and over again.

Just to keep the beautiful machine humming for one more mile.