Image Credit: Copilot
By Dr Rahim Said
Forty years. Four decades. That is not a marriage — that is a civilisation. Complete with its own history, its own wars, its own monuments, and its own inexplicable traditions that outsiders would never fully understand.
And yet, when I try to explain how we got here, I keep returning to an African proverb so simple it almost sounds like something you’d find stitched on a throw pillow: “Little things make a woman love a man in a big way.”
Not grand gestures. Not dramatic declarations. Not a diamond the size of a small republic. Little things.
I believe it. Forty years has taught me to believe it the way you believe in gravity — not because you understand it, but because every time you test it, you hit the floor.
February 9th, Bali. Our anniversary. We were back on the island that seems to have quietly appointed itself the keeper of our most meaningful moments. There is something almost conspiratorial about Bali — the light, the unhurried air, the way time moves differently there, as though the island itself is in on the joke that the rest of the world is moving too fast.
We did not do anything spectacular. We had a meal. We watched the evening do what Bali evenings do. We talked — really talked — the way you only can with someone who has been reading the same book as you for forty years and still finds new sentences to discuss.
That, I have come to understand, is the little thing. Showing up. Choosing the same person again, not out of habit, but out of something quieter and more deliberate than habit. The proverb does not say grand things make a woman love a man. It says little things. Daily effort. Sustained attention. The unremarkable made remarkable by repetition.
Forty years of little things. That is the whole architecture.
And then May arrived, and Bali called again — this time not for quiet reflection, but for something gloriously, chaotically opposite.
A friend turned 72. And he did not turn 72 quietly in a restaurant with a cake that had too many candles. He turned 72 in Bali, surrounded by people from 15 different countries. Fifteen. I counted, partly in admiration and partly in sheer anthropological fascination.
Here is what strikes me about a party like that: you are suddenly in a room where the little things are everything, because the big things — language, culture, background, the particular way your society taught you to say hello — are all different. What remains is laughter at the right moment, a refilled glass before you had to ask, someone making sure you were not standing alone in the corner.
Little things. The proverb travels well, it turns out.
A man who can build friendships across 15 countries by his 72nd birthday has spent a lifetime practising exactly what the African wisdom prescribes — attention, care, the daily accumulation of small gestures that compound, over decades, into something no grand speech could ever manufacture.
There is a version of modern life that is obsessed with the milestone — the anniversary dinner, the birthday party, the big number. And yes, 40 years deserves its dinner. Seventy-two deserves its party.
But what I have learned — slowly, stubbornly, occasionally at great personal cost — is that the milestones are merely the receipts. The real transaction happened on all the ordinary days in between. The Tuesday evenings. The forgettable Wednesday mornings. The moments nobody photographed because nothing was happening, except everything was.
Bali, for me, has become a place where I remember this. Maybe that is why I keep returning. It is not an escape. It is recalibration.
Forty years of marriage, two trips to Bali in the same year, a table of friends from fifteen countries singing to a man who has spent seven decades collecting people worth keeping — if that is not a masterclass in the little things, I do not know what is.
The proverb is right. It has always been right.
We just needed 40 years and a couple of trips to Bali to finally sit still long enough to understand it.
The writer has been married for 40 years and is still, occasionally, surprised by this.