This fall I will have been living with my beloved for forty years, let’s say ‘married’, though we didn’t get really get married until almost ten years later, but our hearts had been set much earlier.

We are planning to celebrate our anniversary with a road trip. We went on a spontaneous trip when we first met, both of us 21 years old. We impulsively decided to hitchhike from Toronto to the east coast for no particular reason.

We had not been together more than a few weeks so we got to know each other on the side of the highway. Now many years later and still pretty much exactly the same characters, we plan to drive down the east coast into the States.

Maybe we will end up moving to the States, you never know. We did end up moving to the east coast from Toronto, many years later, with our two kids, two cats and a student loan. And we did find the good life, a good home and good work.

Our first trip revealed a lot about our characters. It turns out we were well matched. We were unfazed by finding ourselves entering a city without knowing where we were going to sleep that night, and easily pleased by finding a hostel with limitless toast and coffee in the morning, or a bottle of Kahlua that someone had tossed out of a car window.

We learned that we were good travelers, together. We are able to change course on a dime and rise above discomfort. And we are still that way. We may move again, from our fabulous dream home, or we may not. But I do know that if one of us feels strongly enough about a move, that other one will be open to being cajoled or convinced.

We did not start our marriage by thinking we must tie the knot, we must make public betrothals, we must have children. We planned nothing. We were together almost ten years before we had out first child. We just carried on and the years have added up!

I often think of this moment when I picture why we are still together. We were in the middle of a stressful situation, with money at the core (of course) and we were just exhausted. I was seriously irritated with him for something he had said or done and we were heading to bed.

As I made my way up the stairs to share a comfortable bed with one of our children in the house where we were staying, I saw him lying down to sleep, sweetly and generously, on the deflating air mattress.

He had a big handlebar moustache at the time and all I could see from my viewpoint on the stairs was his moustache, as the rest of his body sunk into the mattress. It looked hilarious and I was so amused that I started gigging despite my crabbiness, and then we were both laughing and the argument was forgotten.

Maybe that is marriage. All the times you drop the fight and find your way back. All the dark moods or silent passages that are broken by the offer of a truce: a shared topic of interest or a cup of tea.

It is beautiful to age with someone, to know a body and soul, year after year. It is a great privilege.

When we listen to a song and know what it means to us or when we recognize the generous love of the other and silently appreciate it, the unsaid is gorgeous, an embroidered tapestry of forty years of knowing.