I need to talk about socks.

Not in a “fun quirky gift idea” way. In a “my wife has been hand-knitting me socks for over a decade and I am now physically and emotionally incapable of wearing anything from a store” way. This is not a flex. This is a warning.

Sarah knits socks. She has knit me an uncountable number of socks. I don’t say uncountable because I’m being dramatic — I say it because I genuinely do not know how many pairs of hand-knit socks I own. They’re everywhere. They’re in the sock drawer. They’re in the laundry. They’re drying on the rack. There are socks in various stages of completion on her needles at any given moment. It’s socks all the way down.

And here’s the thing nobody tells you: once you wear hand-knit socks, you are ruined. Store-bought socks feel like wearing sandwich bags on your feet. They’re thin. They slip. They lie to you about being “cushioned.” A hand-knit sock hugs your foot like it was made for you, because — and I cannot stress this enough — it literally was. Sarah makes this waffle stitch sock that I am borderline obsessed with. The texture. The thickness. The way it fits inside a boot. I would write a longer description but I’m already aware that I sound unhinged about socks and I need to pace myself.

She kept knitting me socks when I only had one foot to put them on. That’s the part that gets me. After the ankle surgery, when I was down to one operational foot for months, she didn’t stop. She just kept making socks. Because that’s what she does. She makes things for the people she loves, and if one of those people temporarily only has one working foot, well, that foot is still going to have the best sock it’s ever worn.

That’s the kind of person Sarah is. Knitting a sock takes hours. Many hours. And she has spent thousands of hours over the last decade making sure my feet are warm and my sock drawer is overflowing. If that’s not love I don’t know what is.

And now — because apparently we weren’t deep enough into this — we dye our own yarn. Sarah started dyeing and I kind of wandered over and joined in the way I join most of her hobbies, which is to say I showed up, made a mess, and now it’s “our thing.” So the socks aren’t just hand-knit anymore. They’re hand-dyed AND hand-knit. From raw yarn to finished sock, these things are homemade in every possible way. I am wearing socks that we made from scratch. That’s absurd. That’s beautiful. That’s what happens when you marry someone who knits.

I am not picky about colors. I will wear whatever she makes. Purple, green, speckled, variegated, solid — I don’t care. She made them. They’re perfect.

So this is my public appreciation post for Sarah and for socks. For the waffle stitch and the yarn we dye together and the fact that she never stopped knitting, not even when I was one-footed and feeling sorry for myself. Every pair is a little act of love disguised as footwear, and I am grateful for every single one of them.

If your partner knits, ask them for socks. And then accept that you will never go back.