Over the weekend, the Smilodon and I went to Ikea. Now that his father is leaving the country, he's struck out on his own, rented new digs near my place and took me along to help furnish it. We spent a couple of hours wandering around the Swedish furniture shop laughing at weird product names (the Smilodon bought a frying pan called "Skanke"), scavanging for bargains and debating the merits of metal mesh wastepaper baskets. He insisted on getting some tea light lanterns for the room and using them to navigate his way to the unattached toilet at night. I scoured the pet section for a suitable cat bowl - it's for me to drink milk out of, another manifestation of of our petplay kink - but sadly came up empty-handed. By the end of it we'd had a very productive afternoon and come up with enough soft furnishings to keep the Smilodon comfy at night, enough cookware to see him fed and several other knick-knacks he can amuse himself with. All the stuff was so nice that I jokingly told him that I'd want to spend more time in his new place just to roll in the duvet and play with his lanterns.

Truth to tell, I really am kind of excited about the Smilodon's move. His new place will be close enough for me to roller-blade to, if I can successfully conquer the vague hill that is Toh Tuck Road. We might even meet on the street now and then, or go to the shops together. He'll have a double bed and an obliging housemate who, it seems, is no stranger to nocturnal assignations. He'll have his own stove and fridge and utensils and we'll be able to cook all the stuff we've been planning to whip up. I can't help but count the days till he settles down properly there - this Saturday, to be exact. When he does, I'll give him a hand with the unpacking, help with the cleaning up and try not to look too disgusting in front of his housemate. With our combined efforts, we might be able to make his room look less utilitarian than his current Sixth Avenue lodgings; and not to mention far less dusty.

As much as I have railed against cozy domesticity before, it's beginning to hold a definite appeal. There was something warm and intimate about the way we agonised over the stupid shopping trolley and its eco-friendly but bulging yellow-bag-in-frame design. Our exchanges about wastepaper baskets, dark-coloured bedlinen and the hypothetical goth crowd that had come in and swept up all the black lanterns could never have taken place with anyone else. And I must admit that I felt a fuzzy sort of happiness as we dodged the crowds with his hand over mine on the trolley's handlebar, or whenever he leaned in to sniff at my hair as we made a turn down some aisle or other. For all my misgivings it seemed as if this was something I could slip into, this sense of belonging and partnership. It's something that I'm starting to feel more comfortable being a part of, something I no longer see as an artificial imposition on my independence but as a natural development of my wish for a shared future with this man.

In some ways it makes me realise how far I've come from my days of youthful folly, when love meant an illicit affair flying in the face of social opprobrium, an unrequited pining after some macabre specimen of the male race whom I thought I could transform. Now I realise that it is rather pedestrian after all, two people trying to make things run in the most workaday of circumstances, when love takes place not in exciting hotels or bohemian flats but in between busy hours in the office and on sheets that bear ah-kong-ah-mah floral imprints. I'm not entirely sure how to interpret this yet, but I feel as if I've sobered up somewhat and learnt that love isn't so much in the settings in which acts of affection take place: it's in the acts themselves and their accompanying feelings. And while the acts can be mundane in the extreme, the feelings certainly aren't. They're positively sublime.

I told the Smilodon that I wanted to treat him to dinner again, to celebrate the success of my thesis. He said that he would rather prefer that I showed my appreciation in another way: by buying him a duvet, so that he would think of me whenever he went to bed (also, I'm supposed to roll in it a bit so it will smell like me, but that's another story). At first I was a bit apprehensive. It seemed like an anti-climax: why choose an Ikea duvet over a nice dinner somewhere in a darkened, candlelit booth at a posh restaurant, with inconvenient foods prepared for us by a chef? The more I think about it, though, the more it seems that the duvet, for all its ho-hum-ness, was the right choice. As enjoyable as such a dinner may be, it's no match for the way a simple blanket infuses our presence into everyday life. A meal will end, but the quiet reminder of a loved one gently insinuated into the beginning and end of each day never will - unless, of course, the duvet gets ripped to shreds.

And so it's the slow incorporation of love into daily life that I've come to value most. The text message in the middle of a bus ride. The back rub after a long day at work. Sure, special occasions are nice, but it's the everyday that really becomes hallowed by the presence - or even the merest hint - of tenderness.