On Saturday, Oct. 11, Ann and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary.

Given my terminal cancer, that I am still here to celebrate it with her is a wonder. I thank God for that.

And it’s been a very happy marriage.

We knew going into marriage that we would make it work, though we also understood that storms and choppy waters were certain to lie ahead.

But as many couples do, we assumed that we knew each other. Big mistake: We didn’t. And that notion would light the fire under many future arguments and misunderstandings.

Because, the marrying of two, distinct human beings, each their own quirks and eccentricities — in this case, the bridegroom, a socially awkward intellectual, and the bride, a boisterous extrovert, and both with Attention Deficit Disorder — is bound to lead to “issues.”

So, we accepted that our marriage would not be uniformly sunny. Speaking for myself, I knew I wouldn’t want that. As C.S. Lewis wrote in “Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer,” every one of us knows deep down that nothing that is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality.

“It is of the very nature of the real that it should have sharp corners and rough edges, that it should be resistant, should be itself. Dream-furniture is the only kind on which you never stub your toes or bang your knees.”

“You and I have both known happy marriage,” Lewis continued. “But how different our wives were from the imaginary mistresses of our adolescent dreams! So much less exquisitely adapted to all our wishes; and for that very reason (among others) so incomparably better.”

We in the West also suffer from a multitude of misunderstandings about love and marriage. I suspect the depictions in Hollywood films have something to with that.

It’s worth noting also that our modern idea of romantic love dates to the Troubadours of the early medieval period, and their courts of love. Before that time — and still today in many parts of the world — marriages were arranged by the parents, often as business deals, to link two powerful families. The couple may not even have known or seen each other before the wedding.

In Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and Iseult, the Cornish knight is on a mission to escort Iseult from Ireland to marry his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, when they ingest a love potion, instigating a forbidden love affair between them. The affair was quite dangerous, and not only for the obvious reason of adultery: seems that the Catholic Church considered personal love, love you choose outside of an arranged marriage, heresy at the time.

In his great novel “Anna Karenina,” Leo Tolstoy contrasts the doomed love of the married and doomed Anna and her lover, Count Vronsky, with the happy marriage between the young, socially awkward Konstantin Levin and Princess Kitty Shcherbatsky.

“Levin had been married three months. He was happy, but not at all in the way he had expected to be. At every step he found his former dreams disappointed, and new, unexpected surprises of happiness. He was happy; but on entering upon family life he saw at every step that it was utterly different from what he had imagined. At every step he experienced what a man would experience who, after admiring the smooth, happy course of a little boat on a lake, should get himself into that little boat. He saw that it was not all sitting still, floating smoothly; that one had to think too, not for an instant to forget where one was floating; and that there was water under one, and that one must row; and that his unaccustomed hands would be sore; and that it was only to look at it that was easy; but that doing it, though very delightful, was very difficult.”

It took a while for me, like Levin, to understand that I am not simply close to Ann, but that I don’t know where I end and she begins.

“He felt as a man feels when, having suddenly received a violent blow from behind, turns round, angry and eager to avenge himself, to look for his antagonist, and finds that it is he himself who has accidentally struck himself, that there is no one to be angry with.”

So, happy anniversary to my Annie, who threw in her lot with me on Oct. 11, 2016, and has stuck with me through storm and strife and joy and delight ever since. You are the best.

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.