If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.

Intensity is not what keeps two people together across decades. Friendship is: the liking, the ease, the willingness to be dull in each other’s company, the absence of quiet scorekeeping. Passion arrives and departs on its own schedule and cannot be summoned back by effort, while the friendly part of a bond responds to ordinary attention. A partnership that is also a friendship survives the stretches when feeling runs thin.

Ask whether you would choose your closest person as a friend if nothing else connected you. Then do one friend-sized thing this week, something with no romance in it at all.