What I have accumulated of Nathan, after ten years:
He is incapable of leaving a kitchen after cooking in it without wiping down the counter, even when he is tired. I have never asked him to do this; it is simply what he does. Early in our marriage I read it as a kind of compulsiveness; now I recognize it as a form of care — a belief, held in the body, that the people who come after you should not have to deal with your mess.
He has never once forgotten that I need quiet in the morning. Not for meditation or ritual — I am not a ceremonial person — but simply because my brain boots up slowly, and for the first half hour after waking I am not available for conversation or decisions or anything requiring me to engage with someone else’s needs. He understood this very early and has never, in ten years, violated it. This is more considerate than it sounds.
He reads before bed every night. Not efficiently, not with purpose — he reads the way people used to read before there was always something competing for the attention. Sometimes he reads aloud to me, a paragraph he wants me to know, and then looks up with the expression of someone who has just discovered a small treasure and wants to share it.
He is worse at receiving criticism than he is at giving it, which is true of most people. His first response to criticism is a subtle withdrawal — not anger, but a quality of closing that takes a little time and a little patience to open again. I have learned to give him the time.