I have not been particularly fortunate.

In my fifty-something years, I have yet to encounter a married couple who, having grown old together, managed to preserve the kind of mutual respect I have always imagined to be a natural continuation of love.

I readily accept that such couples exist, and I would even like to believe there are far more of them than my own experience might suggest. It is simply that, among the people whose relationships I have observed closely enough to notice not only their family celebrations and carefully arranged photographs, but also their ordinary conversations around the dinner table, I have encountered rather different stories.

These were people who had spent twenty, thirty, sometimes even forty years together, who had raised children, welcomed grandchildren, survived relocations, illnesses, financial difficulties, and countless other circumstances commonly described as the trials of married life. They knew each other’s habits intimately, remembered the details of events everyone else had long forgotten, and seemed so thoroughly woven into one another’s daily existence that imagining them separately had become almost impossible.

Yet spending even a little time in their company was often enough for something to emerge beneath the apparent stability of these long-standing unions, something that inspired considerably more questions in me than admiration.

I noticed irritation that no one particularly bothered to conceal, mocking remarks delivered with remarkable ease, and that peculiar weariness with another person which reveals itself less through words than through tone of voice, fleeting expressions, and almost imperceptible gestures. Sometimes one spouse would address the other in a manner they would scarcely have considered appropriate with a casual acquaintance; at other times, this way of communicating was mutual and had evidently become the familiar language of their relationship.

What struck me was not the irritation itself, since it is difficult to imagine two people spending decades together without occasionally experiencing fatigue, annoyance, or disappointment in one another. What surprised me far more was how natural this manner of treating each other had become, as though they no longer noticed what, from the outside, appeared to be the gradual disappearance of respect.

They could exchange several unpleasant remarks, openly ridicule each other’s habits, display unmistakable displeasure at the other’s presence, and then, a short while later, speak quite calmly about their happy marriage, invariably specifying exactly how many years they had managed to spend together.

And it was here that I always found a certain irony.

I wanted to ask: if being together is genuinely so good, why do you count the years with such precision? Surely you are not serving a sentence for which you expect to receive a reward for endurance.

Of course, I understand that there is nothing unusual about celebrating anniversaries. On the contrary, it is entirely natural to look back on one’s life, remember its important moments, and take pleasure in knowing that the person with whom a shared story began is still there. For some, another anniversary becomes an occasion to express gratitude, recall everything they have experienced together, and reaffirm the value of a choice made many years earlier.

What interested me, however, was not the desire to count the years, but the remarkable readiness to present their number as evidence that the relationship had been a success.

As though the mere passage of time spent beside another person could somehow prove that those years had been well lived.

As children, we were told fairy tales that ended with the familiar promise that the characters lived happily ever after, and perhaps this is why two quite different things — the duration of a shared life and the emotional quality of that life — gradually merged in our imagination into a single image of a successful marriage.

Yet as adults, we seem to have learned to judge the first with considerable confidence while becoming far less curious about the second.

The length of a marriage is easy to establish; one need only know the wedding date. Happiness, intimacy, and respect, however, cannot be measured in the same way, because they exist not in the calendar of family occasions but in the everyday life that is rarely shown to guests and almost never captured in anniversary photographs.

Respect reveals itself in the way someone speaks to their partner when tired or irritated, in how they refer to them when they are not present, and in whether they can resist the temptation to wound them, even when they know perfectly well which words would hurt the most. It is present in the willingness to recognise another person’s right to their own thoughts, interests, and imperfections, without allowing years of intimacy to become permission to treat them with less consideration than one would offer a stranger.

This is why public admiration for the longevity of a marriage has always made me somewhat uneasy, particularly when the number of years spent together becomes the principal, and sometimes almost the only, reason for celebration.

Fifty years together is undoubtedly impressive, but I would still like to understand what, precisely, we are celebrating.

Fifty years of mutual love and support, fifty years of loyalty to a decision made long ago, or fifty years within a familiar arrangement that neither person ever wished, or dared, to change?

We do not know the answer, nor do we have much right to demand it from people whose shared lives will always be more complicated than our understanding of them.

It would be unfair to draw conclusions about someone else’s happiness from a handful of conversations, because deep affection may exist beneath irritation, a particular kind of intimacy may survive within familiar disagreements, and outward reserve may conceal an understanding that no longer feels any need to demonstrate itself.

Not every moment of weariness indicates an absence of love, just as not every disappointment means that a relationship has lost its meaning.

And yet I remained interested in a question that gradually extended beyond the married couples I had observed.

How does a person come to accept circumstances that would once have seemed entirely unacceptable, and at what point does something cease to be questioned simply because it has become familiar?

At the beginning of a relationship, we are usually extraordinarily attentive to the way we are treated. We notice changes in tone, attach significance to words, try to understand another person’s feelings through their actions, and want to know that our presence in their life is not merely a convenient circumstance but a free and conscious choice.

Over time, however, a shared life develops its own order, in which certain habits become precious, others increasingly irritating, some disagreements are resolved, and others become so firmly embedded in everyday existence that they are no longer regarded as problems requiring attention.

And perhaps, one day, a person simply stops asking the questions that once seemed natural: Do I feel good beside this person? Do I like who we have become to one another? Do I want my life to look like this in ten or twenty years?

This does not necessarily happen because someone has consciously renounced happiness or become afraid of change. Sometimes the very need to reflect on the relationship gradually disappears, as marriage ceases to be a space of mutual choice and becomes an established condition of life, something that no longer appears to require reconsideration.

I do not regard this as necessarily tragic, because people are entitled to define the value of their relationships differently, finding meaning not only in romantic closeness but also in a shared past, mutual care, responsibilities, family traditions, or the stability of a world they have spent decades creating together.

It is entirely possible that, for some couples, preserving the family is a value in itself, one that outweighs the need for emotional intimacy, and it would be presumptuous to declare such a choice wrong simply because it does not correspond to my own understanding of a happy life together.

What continues to interest me, however, is where that almost imperceptible boundary lies beyond which accepting another person’s imperfections gradually becomes a refusal to acknowledge one’s own dissatisfaction, and the maturity that allows us not to demand constant happiness from a relationship begins to resemble the habit of expecting nothing more from it.

For there is a fundamental difference between someone who knows their partner well, understands the difficulties of sharing a life, and continues consciously to choose that relationship, and someone who has become so accustomed to being in it that they no longer regard their own presence as a choice.

From the outside, their lives may look exactly the same: they may celebrate the same anniversaries, tell similar stories about the difficulties they have overcome, and speak with equal certainty about having spent an entire lifetime together, even though the inner meaning of those experiences may be entirely different.

And the more years lie behind them, the harder it may become to distinguish the value of the relationship itself from the value of the time invested in it.

After all, acknowledging that a long marriage is not necessarily a happy one means allowing for a rather uncomfortable possibility: decades of effort, compromise, patience, and repeated decisions to stay do not, in themselves, guarantee the very thing for which two people once decided to join their lives.

Perhaps one of our mistakes lies in continuing to regard relationships as undertakings that must eventually produce a particular result, one that will justify every decision made along the way.

As though a silver wedding anniversary marks the first significant achievement, a golden anniversary confirms the final success, and each subsequent year adds further value to a reward already earned.

Yet a relationship does not become successful on a particular date in the calendar, because its substance continues to be created every day, regardless of how much time has passed since two people first met.

Relationships exist not in anniversaries but in the days between them, in ordinary conversations, breakfasts shared together, tired evenings, small gestures of attention, and the almost invisible decisions through which one person’s attitude towards another gradually takes shape.

And it is here, I think, that the distinction between a long marriage and a lasting love begins to emerge.

A marriage can certainly be preserved even when much of what once constituted its emotional life has changed or disappeared. People can continue living in the same home, maintaining family traditions, raising children, caring for grandchildren, making plans together, and remaining, in the eyes of others, an admirable example of marital devotion.

But love does not have to retain its original form in order to remain love. Over the decades, it may become quieter, lose some of its earlier romantic intensity, and find entirely different ways of expressing itself, and none of these changes necessarily signifies a loss.

What matters far more is whether respect for the person with whom one has shared a life survives those changes, and whether the desire to remain beside them continues to be a choice of one’s own rather than merely the consequence of a decision made long ago.

Respect does not preserve itself simply because two people once decided to join their lives; it continues to exist in the way they treat one another, even when they seem to know almost everything there is to know about each other.

And if, after forty or fifty years together, two people can still speak without seeking to humiliate, remain interested in each other’s thoughts and feelings, accept imperfections without contempt, and preserve that particular tenderness which prevents intimacy from becoming carelessness, then this, to me, is the achievement truly worthy of admiration.

Not the number of years, not the durability of the family structure, and not even the ability to overcome life’s many difficulties, but the continuing desire to treat the person beside you with respect.

At the same time, I believe it is equally important to acknowledge the opposite: deciding to end a long marriage does not necessarily mean diminishing the value of everything that was lived together.

Years that contained love, care, shared joys, and difficulties do not become meaningless simply because, at some point, the relationship no longer meets the needs of two people who have inevitably changed over time.

The past does not require an endless continuation in order to remain part of our lives, and gratitude for a choice once made does not oblige us to spend the rest of our days proving that it was the right one.

Perhaps recognising that a relationship has come to an end requires no less maturity than preserving it, because in either case we must distinguish our ideas about what ought to be from what is actually happening between ourselves and another person.

And still, I want to believe that there are couples who have travelled through decades of shared life without allowing closeness to become mere habit, or habit to turn into indifference.

Perhaps I have simply never been fortunate enough to meet them.

But if one day I encounter two elderly people who have spent half a century together and can still look at one another with warmth, speak with genuine interest, and show respect not only in the presence of others but in the most ordinary circumstances of everyday life, I doubt I will feel any desire to ask how many years they have been married.

I would be far more interested in knowing whether, knowing everything they know now, they would choose each other again.

Because perhaps the true value of a long marriage lies not in the fact that two people never wanted to leave, but in the fact that, decades later, they still want to stay..