I have thought a great deal, since, about why I never let myself add it up before.

It was not that I couldn’t; I am good with numbers, and some part of me had clearly been keeping the ledger all along, or it could not have handed me the totals so completely in that moment.

It was that I was afraid of the sum.

Because a marriage, I have come to believe, is one of the last places we allow ourselves not to count — where keeping score feels like a betrayal of the whole enterprise, where the willingness to give without tallying is supposed to be the very proof of love.

And that willingness is beautiful, when it runs both ways.