I was wrong. Things still can go wrong. For example, I still can’t ride in the car with her driving without going nuts; and she can’t drive with me in the car without doing the same. So we’ve accommodated reasonably cheerfully to that intractable problem: I drive. If I’m temporarily incapacitated by fractures or pain medication, she drives, and I sit backwards behind her, looking out the rear window.

I love sailing; she finds it life-threatening. So, after one life-threatening week off the coast of Maine some years ago, we don’t sail. No big deal. She loves Days of Our Lives; I think it’s the stupidest thing ever filmed – I mean, grown men with no visible means of support, discussing relationships as if they were teenagers at a...never mind. It’s just unbelievably stupid. But she loves it, so I leave her alone while she’s watching, and if I have to go through the room to get something, I stop and stare at her with the kind of face the characters all make at the end of every cliffhanging scene. She probably figures it’s just a cost of doing business with me.

She hates football on television. If the Pats are playing, I like to tune in now and then to see how they’re doing. And I have to have it loud, because if I use the closed-caption option, the caption covers up the score or part of the play. Solution to this: I don’t watch football. She uses her car as not only transportation, but as a sort of mobile closet, as well. If it had a name, it would be Fibber McGee. If my truck had a name, it would be Adrian Monk.

These differences were highlighted some years ago when we both took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. It turned out we were almost polar opposites. The good news was that most couples in long-term relationships (even same-gender ones) are just like us. Felix and Oscar weren’t such an odd couple at all. Opposites, it develops, do indeed attract. But they also drive each other crazy at times. Maybe even lots of times.

This is never more evident in our lives than during the Christmas season. As a child, she could count upon relative stability and happiness in her family only on her birthday and Christmas. So the holiday means a lot to her at a very deep level, and she yearns to share it with as many people as possible. Our family, on the other hand, had the best Christmas we could afford, but it was a time, most of all, for celebrating the birth of Christ according to Luke, and for dressing up in Doctor Dentons and costarring with my sister in a floodlit technicolor 8-mm film showing us discovering the great tree and the toys beneath it. So I get a little grumpy – well, maybe a lot grumpy – at all the gifts coming home in Fibber McGee and needing to be wrapped, labeled, boxed, and sent off to obscure and faraway members of our extended family.

My aim, if I were to be honest, is to make it more trouble for her to get me to do Christmas stuff than to do it herself. But I’ve discovered that if I clumsily push it too far, irritation can explode into exasperation, and then the fat’s in the fire. So it’s probably a very good thing that I read through Dickens’ A Christmas Carol several times each December, and catch hold of the spirit by its coattails, just as Ebenezer Scrooge does, at the last possible moment.

This year I blew it. After giving off all the negative vibrations I could while wrapping eight or nine large gifts, I was ready to retire to my lounger when she announced the tree was tipping to one side and needed immediate attention. The new tree stand I’d just bought wasn’t cutting the mustard. I had to admit she had a point. But we’d have to get out the old one, which she decided she liked better, anyway; loosen the thumbscrews in the holder; lift the heavy, decorated tree straight up off the coffee table and hold it there while she substituted the old one – you get the picture. Impossible, I told her, and slipped into a behavior that marriage counselors call “sacking”: dumping a whole bunch of stuff that you’ve been saving up. It’s nasty, it’s illogical, it’s unfair. But it’s effective! Like a Bouncing Betty land mine, it’s lethal to any personnel within range.

Why, I demanded, didn’t I have any say in choosing the lights and ornaments? Because, she retorted, you don’t care. Again, I had to admit she had a point. I even pay a high school student to come and trim it with her, much as draftees did during the 1860s in order to avoid their own civil war. Why were all the lights the same color? Because she liked them that way, and we have it that way every year. Where did all those stupid fluffy ornaments come from? Where were my grandparents’ old German ornaments? From Walmart (a knife in my heart!), and we never had any of your grandparents’ ornaments. Where were the ones we once made from milkweed pods? They disintegrated long ago.

This was going nowhere, so I fired a parting shot: It just looks dull and metallic, like an artificial department store display window tree. That did it. She called our daughter and her partner, and they came to help while I went to work. Good thing, too; it was a three-person job. And today, as I drove up the driveway, I saw the tree framed in the center windows of the front gable. Gee, I thought, that looks kind of nice! And if I get a chance between now and Christmas, I’ll try to tell her that. Maybe while I’m cheerfully boxing the presents to go to FedEx.