Happy Thanksgiving Day everyone!

Compliments are wonderful ways to communicate your truest feelings to your partner, friends and loved ones. They come in all manners and forms, but the sweetest are those sincere expressions intimately revealed without motive or intent.

Duncan pays me the best compliments. He often doesn't realize how much of a compliment it is at the time, and sometimes I don't either until I think about it for a bit, outside of the mundane context it is usually presented in.

After Duncan moved in with me, he would often lament that he didn't stay up late anymore, or at least as regularly as he did in his previous life. Of course, we would stay up late watching movies and/or playing video games, or going out for the night somewhere, or just walking/talking... but just as frequently we would retire together for the evening - and not just for sex - but to actually go and fall asleep together, in each others arms. So, yeah, every once in a while he would make an offhand comment on how he notices he goes to bed earlier then he used to, but didn't understand why, or what exactly had changed.

Sometimes we just don't notice how much our lives change when they do change.

Then I started my new job, which began last week on a set of night shifts, and Duncan began to notice that he stays up late when I am not home, that he misses me, and that he doesn't go to bed until he really is tired, as there "was no reason to go to bed". And then he noticed a correlation.

He shared this with me the other day... telling me (in casual conversation) that since I had been absent for some nights, he had figured out why he doesn't stay up for half the night anymore, that he now understands what had changed... it was ME, he said, that he actually goes to bed to be with me/spend time with me JUST because he wants to, and that didn't exist for him before he moved in with me.

He goes to bed because he wants to be near me. He goes to bed because he wants to spend time with me, to wrap his arms around me, to talk about our dreams, and to keep me warm. AND he actively makes this choice, no one makes him go to bed.

Can there be a better compliment then that?