Nicole Kidman Opens up About 12 Years of Marriage to Keith Urban

Nicole Kidman might be an Oscar-winning actress, but her favorite roles are wife, to country music superstar Keith Urban, and mother. The 51-year-old regularly joins her husband on the road, along with their two daughters, Sunday Rose and Faith Margaret.

“We go out on the tour regularly,” Kidman tells PEOPLE. “We call it ‘the road trip.’ We sleep in bunk beds, and we get to see — and fall in love with — different parts of America.”

The couple just celebrated 12 years of marriage, learning how to navigate their busy careers with making their relationship work.

“When you make an us, it’s yours together — that’s what you create,” Kidman explains. “Nobody else has that. It’s just between the two of you.”

The couple might have to spend time apart, but there’s one tool they never use to communicate: texting.

“We call,” Kidman tells Parade. “We’ve done this since the very beginning. The reason it started at the beginning was because I didn’t know how to text, and it just kind of worked for us. So now we don’t. We just do voice to voice or skin to skin, as we always say. We talk all the time and we FaceTime but we just don’t text because I feel like texting can be misrepresentative at times.

“I’ve had the thing where I reread texts and I’m like, ‘What does that mean?,’” she adds, “and then read it to somebody and go ‘Can you interpret that?’ I don’t want that between my lover and I.”

Urban also has his own ways to navigate their professional and personal lives. For him, it’s mostly about making sure wherever their jobs take them, they spend as much time together as possible.

“We’re very, very ‘in it’ as a couple: very awake, very present and very in love,” he says (quote via The Boot). “When it does go out of balance, we fix it quickly. We do whatever we’ve got to do. We travel, we do whatever it takes to not be apart.”

The “Coming Home” singer entered substance abuse treatment to overcome his addiction issues only a few months after he and Kidman wed in 2006. His sobriety gave him a new lease on life, and makes him grateful for how rich his life is now.

“To be married, have children, play music for a living — all I’ve ever wanted to do is play music and travel around like a troubadour and try to bring some light and joy [to the world],” he says. “The fact that I get to do that every day is not lost on me.”

Kidman and their children are joining Urban on his Graffiti U Tour, with Kelsea Ballerini serving as his opening act. Find a list of all of his upcoming shows at KeithUrban.net.

Photo Credit: Getty images/Dominique Charriau