I understand and appreciate my spouse for all she/he does to strengthen our marriage.

Somebody in every household keeps the calendar of birthdays. Somebody notices that the washing machine sounds different. That work is invisible by design; it succeeds by nothing going wrong.

Appreciation usually arrives only once the person doing it stops, which is a bad system.

Understanding is the harder half. It means knowing what a thing cost them, not merely that it happened: the phone calls made on a lunch break, the plan quietly rearranged around your week.

Ask what they did in the last few days that you didn't see. The answer tends to run longer than expected.