The hottest thing in a relationship right now? Emotional support

Ranveer Singh cries for almost a full minute in Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, and it's the best thing in the movie. Rocky, confused and unfinished and not performing any of it, just lets Rani watch him fall apart. He is fully himself, and he lets the woman he loves witness it.

Anushka Sharma and Virat Kohli get discussed the same way, constantly, but never for anything you could photograph. We haven’t seen them do a lot of grand things. What people say almost fondly, is that they seem to genuinely like each other. They read as a unit. There's a lovely texture to that kind of public couple, unflashy and slightly boring even.

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It turns out there's research that backs up the instinct, though nobody needed a study to feel it. One of the largest relationship-satisfaction projects ever run, pooling data from 43 labs and over 11,000 couples, found that how satisfied two people feel has far more to do with the everyday texture of the relationship, appreciation, perceived commitment, how conflict gets handled, than with anything about who they are on paper.

A separate study out of Berkeley and Chicago found something similarly unglamorous: feeling truly known by a partner predicts satisfaction more reliably than almost anything else, precisely because being known is what makes feeling supported possible in the first place.

In Normal People Connell was just bad with words and visibly trying anyway, which turned out to be more devastating than any amount of brooding in an expensive coat. Marianne didn't need him to be mysterious. She needed him to ask if she was okay and actually wait for the answer.

Contemporary romance fiction has built its whole engine around men like this now. The unreadable love interest, your Darcy types stretched across two decades of paperbacks, has been replaced by men who text back, apologise specifically, and don't vanish for three chapters to "sort their feelings out" alone in a cabin somewhere.

The new heart-throb can't keep a straight face

Persuasion got there first, obviously. Captain Wentworth's letter does more seductive work in two paragraphs than any duel Austen could have written, and Anne Elliot doesn't swoon because he's grand, she swoons because he's finally, plainly understood her.

The grand gesture hasn't disappeared. It's just been demoted to garnish, the thing you do once, photograph, and move on from. When I was a child, I adored Disney princess films, but they always ended with the couple getting married, and a very vague ‘happily ever after’.

A bouquet is easy and always has been. A person who doesn't flinch, who can sit through someone else's bad day without making it about himself, is a much harder role to cast, and a much harder one to fake. Rocky cried on screen and an entire country fell for him. Make of that what you will.