For more than 40 years, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell have shared one of Hollywood’s most enduring love stories.

They raised a family together. They built a life together. They’ve walked countless red carpets side by side.

But they never got married.

And according to Goldie, that wasn’t an accident.

Goldie and Kurt became a couple in 1983 after reconnecting while making Swing Shift. Both had already experienced marriage before, and as their relationship became serious, they decided they didn’t need a wedding certificate to prove their commitment.

Years later, Goldie explained the thinking behind that decision.

For her, freedom mattered.

She has said that remaining unmarried gave both of them a sense that they were staying because they genuinely wanted to — not because a legal document required them to.

“I chose to stay, Kurt chose to stay,” Goldie once explained.

More recently, she put the idea even more simply:

“We want to choose each other every day.”

That’s what makes their story so different.

Goldie wasn’t saying commitment didn’t matter. She was saying that, for them, commitment meant waking up and continuing to choose the same person while still maintaining their individuality.

Kurt has expressed a similar view, saying that a marriage certificate wouldn’t have created something they didn’t already have.

Together they built a blended family that includes Goldie’s children Kate and Oliver Hudson, Kurt’s son Boston, and their son Wyatt Russell.

And through all those years, the question kept following them:

Why don’t you just get married?

Eventually, even their children were asked whether it mattered to them.

According to Goldie and Kurt, it didn’t.

Their family already felt like a family.

More than four decades later, perhaps that’s the part of their story people misunderstood.

They didn’t avoid marriage because they were afraid to commit.

For Goldie and Kurt, staying was the commitment.

There was always a door they could walk through.

They simply kept choosing not to.