Ten minutes later, they were laughing again

Dora, eighty-six and married sixty-seven years, remembered the fights this way: "On the bad nights we slept with our backs turned. The next morning he came into the kitchen, made two pieces of toast, and set them on a plate. That was the apology. Ten minutes later you forget about it. The problem isn't the fight — it's deciding to hate each other afterward." What carried them past half a century was not avoiding conflict but knowing how to end it.