There were tears after a woman took to social media to reveal what her boyfriend had been doing with the notes she left in his lunch.
Aubrey, who was working as a park ranger at the time, first met her boyfriend Richard at a heavy metal concert in February 2024. “We just hit it off immediately,” Aubrey told Newsweek. “Our first date felt like a breath of fresh air. We were absolute opposites, but somehow we fit together perfectly.”
Things moved fast. Aubrey and Richard had only been dating a couple of months when, aware that his girlfriend was having difficulties with her roommate, Richard asked her to move in with him. “He took me into his home with my cat, Clyde,” Aubrey said.
Soon after, disaster struck when Aubrey lost her job. Thankfully, Richard was ready and willing to pick up the slack. “My boyfriend is a fabricator and mechanic for a large company and was able to take care of me,” she said. “He literally saved my life.”
Eager to show her appreciation while she busied herself applying for jobs, Aubrey took to making Richard lavish lunches to take to work and dinner when he got home. That was how the notes started.
“I started leaving cute little love letters on blue sticky notes,” Aubrey said. “Some were very sweet, but others got a little weird, ranging from messages like, ‘Don’t forget to drink water I love you!’ to doodles warning, ‘Help, I’m an abomination.’”
Aubrey has never considered herself especially artistic, but she has always been creative and wanted to find a way of letting Richard know how important he was to her. “He makes me so happy, I just wanted to make him happy too,” she said.
To Aubrey, the notes were just one element of what is often referred to as her “love language”; the means by which she shows her appreciation for Richard. It falls under the category of “words of affirmation”; making sure to let someone know how much they care is important, but it is not something every American does.
A 2022 poll of 1,000 U.S. adults conducted by YouGov found just 19 percent of respondents use “words of affirmation” to convey their feelings to a loved one, with quality time (38 percent) and physical touch (24 percent) the preferred choice of many.
For Aubrey, it is about showing Richard how much she appreciates him, regardless of what others think. “He works an incredibly hard job,” she said. “His co-workers teased him about it, but they’re just jealous of our love and relationship.”
What started as an occasional message has since become a regular thing, with Aubrey leaving notes in Richard’s lunch “almost every day.” For a time, she may have wondered what he made of the notes and how much they meant to him.
However, that all changed the day Aubrey discovered he had been stashing the notes away for safekeeping. Aubrey took to Reddit, posting under the handle u/harold_the_cat, to reveal how she had come across the notes. “I found the letters, not well hidden, in our small house,” she said.
The notes and the discovery that Richard had been holding on to them struck a chord with many on social media. At the time of writing, Aubrey’s Reddit post has been upvoted nearly 10,000 times, with many left emotional and in awe of the couple’s relationship.
“Good job, you two. Keep it going,” one user wrote. “You are both keepers,” another posted, with a third adding: “May a love like this find me.”
Aubrey, for her part, was left emotional at finding the notes. “It just made me feel so loved that he really does care that much,” she said. “He says my meals and the notes are the best part of his day.”
With Aubrey and Richard happy together and very much in love, the good news is that there are no plans for the notes to stop anytime soon. “I will do it til the day I die,” Aubrey said. “He means the world to me and we’re grateful for each other.”
