Disbelief at What Wife Has Been Doing for Husband 'Every Day' Over 20 Years

A man has revealed how, for the past two decades, his wife has been serving up a regular reminder of the special place he holds in her heart.

It was French novelist Marcel Proust who once famously said "love is space and time measured by the heart." Proust believed that when someone is loved, it's an emotion so deeply held that it transcends physical distance and the passage of time. The idea that an individual might be capable of remaining madly in love with someone, decades on from when they first met, might sound fanciful to the skeptics among us, but there is some science behind the notion.

In 2011, a study published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience presented neurological evidence backing the idea that it is possible to be madly in love with someone after decades together. As part of the research, MRI scans were conducted on couples who had been happily married for an average of 21 years and those of couples who considered themselves to be newly in love. The scans identified the same levels of activity in the dopamine-rich areas of the brain in both groups and suggest that, for some, the excitement of romance burns brightly for, regardless of time.

Real love goes beyond simply words or biology though, as Marc Gignac can attest. For much of the past 20 years, his wife, Serena Chen, has been including something in his lunch that serves as a reminder of how much she cares: a little doodle that never fails to raise a smile. "We batch cook on the weekend for our lunches and she'll sit down for an hour and sketch up five to 10 of these and stuff them in my lunch bag in the morning," Gignac told Newsweek.

Chen has been drawing as a hobby and occasional side gig for as long as Gignac has known her and regularly posts her work to Instagram under the handle serenadrawing. She doesn't doodle every day, but rather "as time allows." However, the sketches she creates for Gignac serve a purpose that goes beyond art or amusement. "Her thought and care expressed in these sketches are a daily reminder of how lucky and loved I am, and that makes everything else in life easier," he said.

There was one recent day at work, where things were getting on top of him, when one of Chen's doodles made all the difference. "The day had been a grind and I hadn't had a chance to have lunch until late in the afternoon," Gignac said. "Getting her note was like a breath of fresh air. It made me smile. So I made the post."

Eager to share the tokens of her sweet gesture with the world, Gignac uploaded a selection of Chen's doodles to Reddit under the handle u/Infamous-Ground9095, alongside a caption explaining: "Every day my wife includes a doodle in my lunch, we've been together 20 years. Here is a small sample..."

Gignac didn't know what to expect when he first posted the pictures. "We're just ordinary middle-aged people," he said. "We have no clout, we aren't influencers. I really thought maybe 10 or 15 people might get a chuckle from this." However, at the time of writing, the post has been upvoted 90,000 times on Reddit, generating 1,500 comments along the way. One user called the drawings "a beautiful testament to love, creativity, and commitment," with another branding it "serious relationship goals." A third added: "If that's not love I don't know what is."

Gignac puts the post's popularity to the "undeniably authentic" quality of Chen's gesture: a reminder of her lasting love for him. He looks forward to each and every one because they serve as not only a reminder of her devotion to him but also represent a microcosm of her, the woman he fell in love with all those years ago.

"It makes me feel blessed and humbled to be a part of her life," he said. "If you knew Chen, you would know that this is how she approaches everything, she has no guile or ulterior motive. She wants to be a positive influence, to find ways to make life a little better or easier for the people she loves. It's just who she is. I just have the amazingly good fortune of being with her more than anyone else."

For Gignac and Chen, Proust's words really do ring true: "love is space and time measured by the heart."