Room for conjecture.

Its always difficult to appreciate what you have. It's difficult because, what you have is often hidden under a mass of other experiences which distort the singular benefit.
When I go visiting in Swansea and when I close the door on Swansea and return to my home in Bishop's Stortford there is the inevitable analysis which goes on as I pull away in the car. How had the visit gone. I had just spent a week or two,with someone who I had, up until twelve months ago rarely spent a day apart, in forty two years.
That in its self is room for conjecture, especially in so far as one had worked through those forty plus years expecting to continue right up to the final exit.
Complacency is a term which is decried as taking for granted, assuming that as one hunkers down in the every day, one is seeing life for both of you and that your prism is hers. In fact it never was and it's the realisation of this fact and whether you are prepared to make, possibly many, perhaps fundamental concessions on route to some sort of happiness. Of course if the concessions are such that you are drawn 'far away' from your own comfort zone to accommodate the other then a certain amount of hostility or at least dissatisfaction arises and questions the why are we different. I contend it's the man's position on these matters, if we are different at least recognise that difference is healthy and one must never try to change fundamentally the way a person is.
 But it's not the 'overall, which one comes away with its the 'particular'. The silly things that whilst not annoying are a measure of the otherness of life with another. The need to tip toe when using the toilet at night for "fear" of wakening, the inevitable complaint when getting up early and cooking bacon and eggs, "that smell is dreadful" . the sound of the TV, "too loud" and the program's "too boring". These in themselves are a poor case for setting against the continuous interactive communion that people living together give themselves in all kinds of little ways.
 This is especially so when one or other is sick, it provides an opportunity to show the other that, underplaying every thing, "you care". In some ways this is pivotal since after years of entrenched assumption and dis enhancement, the opportunity to show you care is forced into view and both the 'giver' and 'receiver' remember "back then" to how it was different.
We are rather like crustacean, like limpets solidly hanging on to what we perceive as our rights as the individual we still see ourselves to be and of course we are correct since, marriage, cohabiting, is not the natural order and requires much from the individual to subvert their natural inclination, into a form of "levitation" between where they would normally be on a subject but where, for the sake of the cohabiting state you are in, as you move away from, what is your norm.
Forty two years of suspended levitation leaves the foundations somewhat shaky but then having ones early years confirmed is sort of satisfying too.