In the the past 40 years, New Jersey resident Bill Bresnan has written over 10,000 love letters, notes and cards to his wife Kirsten – that’s almost one for each night of their marriage. The couple’s unique love story was recently covered by the media, and Bill and Kirsten, both 74, spoke about the secrets of their successful marriage.

The couple met when Bill was teaching a class back in 1974, and Kirsten happened to be his student. “She was this beautiful Northern European woman who struck me like a bolt of lightning,” Bill said in an interview with ABC News.

“Not long after meeting in class Kirsten and I began commuting to and from Long Island, together, on the Long Island Railroad.” And that’s when the practice of writing notes began. “We exchanged notes, drawings, and little scribblings on paper napkins over coffee on the train.”

Bill and Kirsten soon began to date. “It was about this time, in the mid to late 1970s, that I started to send her periodic, funny cards as well as post cards from the various cities at which I was training,” he said. “I’d mail a card from Chicago, a note from Los Angeles, a napkin from a restaurant in Boston. All the letters are signed, ‘I love you my darling,’ with an infinity sign.” Bill kept up the practice of writing love letters even after they were married. The year that Kirsten turned 50, he sent her birthday cards 50 days in advance of the actual date, as a milestone for each year.

A few years ago, the couple decided to create a filing system that organised the thousands of cards and letters according to date. “To this day, we have organised this collection in such a way that any time we’d like to know where we were or what we were doing on a particular day, we take out the file and revisit the past,” Bill explained. “They’re essentially a love diary. For example, I could pick out a day in 1982, and it’ll begin with the restaurant we ate in or a movie we saw and then a reaction to that.”

It’s really quite endearing to see a couple as much in love today as they were four decades ago. “There’s no TV in our bedroom and never has been,” Bill said. “We eat by candlelight every night with romantic music playing in the background; every goodnight kiss is followed by I love you, the morning ones too.”

“The key to any relationship is that you both have to work at it every day,” he added. “And never go to bed mad. Talk about everything. Everything should get resolved before your goodnight kiss. We’ve never had a fight once in almost 40 years of marriage… we might disagree on something, but we talk about it rather than argue.”

Bill said that he hopes their love story will inspire younger couples to work more on their relationships. “I see youngsters at restaurants sitting across from each other, buried in their screens but never talking or looking at each other.” he observed. “I want them to enjoy the time they have with each other and treasure it.”

Source ABC News