Not just the years. What they were made of.

Start where you actually live

Almost nobody's marriage is best described by the wedding. It's described by a Tuesday: who makes the coffee, who handles the hard phone calls, the look across a room that means let's go home. Those are the moments worth capturing, because they're the ones your partner has never heard you name.

Moments worth capturing

• An ordinary ritual: the walk, the Sunday, the thing you always do without discussing it.
• The running joke, and the night it started.
• A small act of care they do so consistently they've stopped noticing it.
• The moment the relationship changed — when it got serious, or survived something.
• A hard stretch you got through, and what they did during it.
• Something you feel constantly and rarely say.
• The version of them only you get to see.

Questions that unlock it

If you sit down to "write something about our marriage," you'll freeze. Answer one of these instead, in whatever words arrive:

• "What's a small, ordinary moment I'd never want to forget?"
• "When did I know?"
• "What do you do that I've never thanked you for?"
• "What would surprise you about how I see you?"
• "What do I hope the next ten years look like?"

Just the two of you, or the people who watched

One partner's moments make a complete anniversary tribute, and for most anniversaries that's the right size — it's meant to be intimate. For a 25th or a 50th, or when you're making it for a couple rather than for a partner, a few other voices belong: the friends who watched them love each other for years, the kids who realized how good they had it. Keep it small; a handful of specific moments outperforms a crowd.

The easiest way to begin

One ordinary evening. Four lines. The photo you took that night on your phone. That's a real anniversary gift, and it takes about ten minutes.