Making it last

C and I will be celebrating our Silver Wedding Anniversary next month.  That’s 25 years of weddedness as well as the four years together prior to that.  We bumble along quite nicely.  I can honestly say that we have never rowed, ever.   We have periods of time when we don’t talk to each other much, but mostly it’s a simple existence alongside each other.

Gone are the heady days of “being in love” you experience in the early days of relationships.  We’ve very much settled into the gentler form of loving each other through caring, mutual respect, sharing and so on.

Our actual anniversary will be on a Tuesday.  We may well go out for dinner that night, but it’s a working day for me.  We have plans to go away for an extended break towards the end of next month instead.  The day itself will pass probably quite unremarkably, just like so many other anniversaries, and pretty much most of the days in between. We are unlikely to bother buying each other presents of any significance, although chocolates always welcome!

Its not just about celebrating one day though and recognising we “did a thing” all that time ago, which often these days is an achievement itself, when divorce can be such an easy way out.  Its about the lasting love we have, and show each other, every day.  It’s the attention we pay to each other through the many iterations of our relationship.  Its about the unremarkable years the card shops don’t have cards for.

An article in Red magazine by Natasha Lunn sums it up nicely when she said that when we commit to someone we have no idea who each person will be in ten, twenty, thirty years’ time.  You make a pact to build a life together without knowing what it will look like. Loving someone means noticing their emotional shifts, rather than making assumptions based on an older version of them we once knew.  By “re-seeing” the other person we can be reminded that its wonderful to know that person can still surprise us.

When we choose to accept that getting to know someone we love is an ongoing process, we can see it as a gift. That’s the only gift I need for our Silver Wedding Anniversary.