After 32 years of marriage, Mary and Stephen Lindop still start each day with a hug. When Stephen wakes up, he embraces his 67-year-old wife and kisses her on the forehead, nose and chin. He knows Mary loves him, even when she doesn’t say the words.

“You can feel a cat purring when a cat is happy, and that’s how you know the cat loves you — it’s the same with Mary,” explains Stephen, 66. “I can feel that Mary loves me.”

Stephen and Mary rely on touch and intuition to read their relationship. They are both deaf-blind. They communicate with sign language. In the dark, they use tactile finger-spelling.

There are varying degrees of deaf-blindness. Stephen is completely deaf and has minimal vision due to a bout of tuberculosis when he was 6. He can only see objects extremely close up — watching television entails getting down on all fours and pressing his face up to the screen.

Mary was born deaf and started losing her vision a decade ago. She still sees better than her husband, however, and occasionally guides Stephen by having him walk behind her with his hands on her shoulders, conga-line style.

The relationship is not always easy. But even if given the choice, they would still choose each other over getting their sight and hearing back.

“I would rather stay with my husband and remain deaf-blind,” Mary says, speaking through an intervenor. The first time Mary Dulcie Vallis met Stephen Raymond Lindop, they were only nine and eight years old, respectively. For one year, Stephen sat behind Mary at a school for the deaf in Montreal. They parted ways that summer and didn’t see each other again for more than two decades. Stephen left for Ontario; Mary quit school after Grade 4 and moved home to Newfoundland.

In 1975, Stephen relocated to Newfoundland and found work as a weaver. A few years later, they reconnected while shopping. Stephen had to move in close to see Mary’s face, but he recognized her immediately.

“We didn’t wait a long time to get married,” Stephen says. “We just knew.” On July 21, 1979, Stephen and Mary married in a civil ceremony in a friend’s garden. Today, a photo of their wedding day is imprinted on a coffee mug, which Stephen proudly shows to visitors and displays in their apartment at the Rotary Cheshire Home in Toronto.

At the RCH, which houses 16 deaf-blind people, Mary and Stephen spend most of their time together, perhaps knitting, chatting or cooking. While Mary adores children, she and Stephen never had any — when she was a young woman, Mary’s mother forced her to get sterilized.

Mary and Stephen have learned to navigate the obstacles of their relationship. Being blind-deaf — and developing a heightened sense of touch — also had its benefits when they were young lovers, Stephen concedes.

“The sex is good,” he signs enthusiastically, chuckling as Mary makes an embarrassed face.

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Stephen signs with gusto, sometimes making him look like an orchestra conductor. This can be a problem when he knocks things over or catches Mary in the face; when she wants him to quiet down, she mimes tying up his hands. He has never heard his wife’s voice, or seen her face with perfect clarity, but in his mind, there is nothing more vivid than Mary.

“I know everything about her,” he says. “And now we’re getting old together.”