This is an opinion column

If you ask the long-married couples you know what they want for Valentine’s Day, some will give the expected answers: A romantic dinner for two with wine pairings for each course. A dozen long-stemmed roses gracing the table. A large box of Godiva chocolates. A surprise trip to the beach or the mountains.

But some will have different choices on their list, surprising ones. A friend of mine wants her sweetheart of so many decades to clean out the garage. It’s not a romantic thing to do, but it’s what she wants. The clutter in the corners, the rakes and old mops and long-handled shovels, stick out and will trip somebody someday. Maybe today. It would be so romantic if he would sort them out and hang them up.

Another friend wants his wife to actually use the gizmos and gadgets he’s bought her over the years: The earbuds and headsets and all the ways she could listen to her music or her podcasts instead of blaring them from her phone. It’s an old phone, by the way. She won’t update, he tells her. She may not even know what a Twitter account looks like. She’s so 20th century. She needs to move up.

And all of us who are in the category of the long-married know this: No matter how long you have been together, you are still separate people, merging together like two cars on a highway, then driving apart when you need to. Raising children means merging for years, taking turns, with one of you rocking a sick baby while the other dashes off to the pharmacy for his ear drops.

Being apart is sometimes necessary, like for work trips, but choosing to be apart, like for week-end trips with high school girlfriends is a choice, usually a happy one. You don’t have to be together 24-7, unless you want to, of course.

If your Valentine is the same one you’ve looked across the table at for 50 years, the wrinkles are there but you ignore them. The hair on the pillow is gray, or there’s no hair there at all. Overtime, you become each other’s funny Valentine, with all your flaws and your flab and your faults out there for the other to see.

Eventually, long-time Valentines work out a system. It involves who makes the coffee? Who scrambles the eggs? Who pays the bills? Who does the laundry, the yard work, the Christmas cards? It’s a fluid system, and may change with age and waning ability. Systems aren’t the stuff of romance, but they work. They’re necessary.

Older couples are always giving unsolicited advice to younger couples. So here’s mine: Accept your differences. If one of you likes beef and the other never touches it, fill up your plate accordingly. If one of you watches sports on TV and the other would rather go to a dental appointment than watch—say—the Super Bowl—sit in separate rooms. Take a walk. Read a book. Be a good sport about sports.

If you’re lucky enough to sit across from each other in front of the fireplace, reading separate books or magazines, eating different kinds of snacks and drinking different kinds of beverages, you obviously found something to admire about your funny Valentine of so many years. You obviously married a friend. Maybe friendship’s just another name for romance.