My partner and I laugh every day

Most couples have a word that means nothing to anyone else, a mistranslation off a menu in 2014, a thing a child said wrong once and it stuck. Say it in company and you get blank faces and one person laughing too hard.

That private vocabulary is a decent measure of a shared life. It cannot be manufactured, only accumulated.

Daily laughter is rarely funny in any exportable way. It is low-grade, stupid, repetitive: the same joke about the neighbour, the same voice for the cat. It costs nothing and it does something structural.

If it has been a while, the old jokes usually still work.