Cherishing
Holding someone dear as something precious to be guarded.
Cherishing is holding someone dear as something precious to be guarded. The chest carries a warm protective weight. The face shows soft, tender attention. You recognise what is precious about this person. You hold them with care because they matter.
Treat the precious thing as precious now, not later
Cherishing is the practice of treating something as valuable while you still have it. We are good at retroactive cherishing. After the funeral. After they leave. After the house is sold. Cherishing while it is still here is the harder skill. It requires noticing what you have on a Tuesday afternoon when nothing is happening. The person sleeping in the next room. The dog at your feet. The morning light in the kitchen. None of these are guaranteed past today. Cherishing is not melancholy. It is the active gratitude of someone who knows they are temporarily holding something they will eventually lose. Treat it that way. Now. While you can.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
— Mary Oliver
Cherishing has a distinctive body signature of careful warm holding. The chest carries warm protective weight. The breath is full and steady. The face shows soft tender attention, often with slight smile of recognition. The voice carries particular gentle warm quality when addressing or speaking about the cherished person. The body holds itself in a way that suggests careful regard; movements toward the cherished person are often softer, more aware. There is often the impulse toward small acts of care that recognise the other's preciousness. The state can be sustained over years or decades when conditions support it.
Cherishing has been studied less directly than some forms of love but appears in research on relationship maintenance and what some researchers call savouring close relationships. Research on relationship quality has shown that practices that involve actively appreciating and valuing partners contribute to relationship satisfaction and longevity. Gottman's research on couples identified what he called fondness and admiration as features of stable relationships, which overlap with cherishing (Gottman, 1999). The capacity for cherishing appears to be cultivatable through specific practices including deliberate attention to what makes the other precious.
Cherishing arises through specific conditions involving sustained recognition of others' preciousness. Common patterns include:
Cherishing is one of the more cultivatable forms of love when attention is directed toward it. The following help.
Notice what specifically makes the other person precious
Cherishing develops through specific attention to particular qualities rather than abstract regard. Noticing what specifically you value about this person, what their particular gifts and qualities are, what would be lost if they were not in your life, supports the felt sense of preciousness. The specificity matters; generic appreciation does not produce the same effect.
Express what you cherish
Verbalising or otherwise expressing what you cherish about another person often deepens both the felt cherishing and the relationship. Letters, conversations, small acknowledgments all support this. The expression communicates the cherishing to the other and reinforces it in your own felt experience.
Engage in small acts of care that recognise preciousness
Cherishing often involves small acts of care that recognise the other's specific preciousness rather than generic helpfulness. Knowing what particularly matters to this person and engaging with it supports the cherishing relationship. The acts do not need to be large; the attention to specifics matters more than the scale.
Allow awareness of mortality to inform engagement
The recognition that the cherished person will not always be available often intensifies cherishing. While dwelling on mortality is not the goal, allowing this awareness to inform present engagement often produces more substantial cherishing than treating relationships as if they will always be available. People who have experienced losses often understand this directly.
If cherishing feels difficult to develop
Sustained difficulty cherishing others, including people you intellectually value, may signal patterns worth attending to: attachment patterns from early life, particular psychological structures, sustained emotional limitation that warrants its own attention. The capacity for cherishing is widely shared but can be specifically blocked by these patterns. Working with the underlying patterns, sometimes through therapy, often makes cherishing more accessible.
"Gottman's research on stable couples identified fondness and admiration as one of the foundational features. Active appreciation and valuing of partners contributes to relationship satisfaction and longevity."
— A summary of Gottman's research on relationship quality
What is cherishing?
Cherishing is holding someone dear as something precious to be guarded. The body has settled into a particular kind of careful, valuing orientation toward another. The chest carries warm protective weight. The face shows soft tender attention. There is a quality of recognising what is precious about this person and holding them accordingly, of being careful with them because they matter. Cherishing specifically refers to the felt experience of holding someone dear as precious, with particular care that recognises their preciousness. The precious-holding quality is essential.
Where do people feel cherishing in the body?
Cherishing has a distinctive signature of careful warm holding. The chest carries warm protective weight. The breath is full and steady. The face shows soft tender attention, often with slight smile of recognition. The voice carries particular gentle warm quality when addressing or speaking about the cherished person. The body holds itself in a way that suggests careful regard; movements toward the cherished person are often softer, more aware. There is often the impulse toward small acts of care that recognise the other's preciousness. The state can be sustained over years or decades when conditions support it.
How is cherishing different from loving?
Loving is the broader category that includes multiple forms of love. Cherishing is the specific form involving the careful holding of someone as precious. A person can love without cherishing (loving someone without the specific awareness of preciousness and corresponding care). Cherishing involves the additional dimensions that broader love does not require. The distinction matters because cherishing typically supports relationships more substantially than love alone; Gottman's research on stable couples identified fondness and admiration (which overlap with cherishing) as foundational features of relationships that persist over time. Loving without cherishing can produce taking-for-granted patterns that damage relationships even when love is genuinely present.
Can cherishing be cultivated?
Yes. The capacity for cherishing appears to be substantially cultivatable through specific practices including deliberate attention to what makes the other precious. Noticing what specifically you value about this person, what their particular gifts and qualities are, what would be lost if they were not in your life, supports the felt sense of preciousness. Expressing what you cherish to the other often deepens both the felt cherishing and the relationship. Engaging in small acts of care that recognise the other's specific preciousness rather than generic helpfulness supports the cherishing relationship. Allowing awareness of mortality to inform engagement, without dwelling on it, often intensifies cherishing.
How do you cherish someone you've taken for granted?
Several practices help reverse taking-for-granted patterns. Deliberately noticing what specifically you value about the person, often by imagining what would be lost if they were not in your life, often restores capacity to see them as precious. Asking yourself what you would miss most about them, what specific qualities matter, what their particular gifts are, often reveals more than ordinary attention shows. Expressing appreciation directly, including for specific qualities and contributions, both reinforces your felt experience and supports the relationship. Engaging in small acts of care that recognise their preciousness specifically helps reverse generic relationship patterns. When taking-for-granted patterns have been sustained, working with them deliberately often produces more substantial relationship benefit than just hoping cherishing will return; the cultivation is real and worth attending to.
- Gottman, J. M. (1999). The Marriage Clinic: A Scientifically Based Marital Therapy. W. W. Norton.
Cherishing sits in the love family as one of its most relationally substantive forms. It overlaps with devotedness when sustained loyalty is central, with fondness when gentle warm regard is the focus, with adoration when reverent quality is more prominent, with valuing when cognitive recognition is emphasised, and with what relationship research has identified as one of the practices that supports sustained mutual satisfaction in close relationships.
See where cherishing sits among the other 402 emotions.
Open Cherishing on the wheel