In marriage, it's the small things and moments that really bring us closer. It's not that the big stuff doesn't count; it definitely does. But it's those little things that really make the relationship feel deeper and more cared for. These traditions are different in every relationship. A London-based woman named Holly Burt shared a beautiful tradition that her husband Emre follows every day while returning home from work. She posted a recording of the same in a TikTok video, which is currently making rounds on social media with a whopping 16 million views and 2 million likes on TikTok.
Holly, 29, shared a clip of her husband Emre waving at her from the top of a double-decker bus. She says he makes the same sweet gesture every evening. “Every night my husband comes home from work, he calls me from the bus and wants me to wave at him from our living room.” she wrote on the clip’s overlay. Each weeknight, as his bus passes their flat in Farringdon, Emre waves at her to let her know he's about to return home from work. Holly declared in the caption, “I married a golden retriever!” According to TikTok trends, a “Golden Retriever Husband” is trusting and kind, happy-go-lucky, lighthearted, unashamed of his feelings, and full of optimism and positivity. Basically, a good boy.
Image Source: TikTok | holly_burt
The couple's delightful ritual got thousands of TikTok users hooked. A Brooklyn-based Tiktoker kelsey_kotzur remarked, “That’s cute as hell!” @pipprika suggested, “You need to record as many as you can and make a montage. Imagine watching that when you’re both 80!” @gigiheaux declared, “I need my future husband to have this energy or I don’t want it.” @mkjz1267 exclaimed, “That’s what I call romantic!” Even more so, the video also caught the attention of Amazon AE, who also commented on the clip.
Image Source: TikTok | amazonae
Image Source: Tiktok | bmblbb
Image Source: Tiktok | mariannayork
The same clip was also shared by Holly on her Instagram page, and the response was the same.
In another TikTok video, Holly describes how she met her “golden retriever husband.” According to Holly’s social media profiles, the two of them tied the knot in the fall of 2023 and had a big fat Turkish wedding. In this particular video, Holly describes her over-the-top love for her husband, “Look at my husband. Emre is a really, really such a sweet guy.”
You can follow Holly Burt on TikTok and Instagram for more vlogs like this.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.