the reason we started this stopped existing about five years ago

Something I have been chewing on since the winter and cannot put down.

We opened up in 2018 for a specific reason. I had a long stretch of being unwell, two operations, about eighteen months where I was not myself in any respect and our marriage got very quiet. When I came out the other side of it there was a lot of ground to make up and we were both frightened of how easily the quiet had settled. Doing something deliberate and slightly alarming was, at the time, exactly what we needed.

It worked. It absolutely worked, and I would recommend it to anyone in that particular hole.

The thing is, that hole closed around 2020. I have been well for years. The marriage is not quiet. Nothing about our life now resembles the conditions that made us do it.

And we are still doing it. Eight years this summer, same as always, four or five times a year, quite happily.

What I cannot answer is whether that is a good sign or a strange one. A treatment you carry on taking after the illness has gone is not usually described as a success.

I have not raised this with him and I am aware that raising it will sound like I am building towards ending it. I am not, I do not think. But I would like to know whether we are still choosing this or whether it is simply what we do now, in the way we always go to the same place in August because we went there once when it mattered.

For the people ten and fifteen years in: did the original reason survive? And if it did not, did you ever go back and check whether you still wanted it, or does that question just not get asked?