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It’s our fourth anniversary today. I know that’s not really a milestone (insofar as any year’s anniversary is one); that’ll come next year, with our fifth. But I don’t see us doing anything bigger next year than we’ll do this year. Like with everything else, Jon and I don’t make that big of a deal of our anniversary. We don’t even get each other gifts.
That’s something we stopped doing before we were even married. The first year or two we were dating we got each other anniversary presents, but that ceased by the time we graduated from college. I might have tried to hold onto the tradition for a bit longer, (if for nothing else than because I love presents), but it’s hard to find gifts for Jonathan. It doesn’t help that our anniversary falls between his birthday and Christmas, so that’s a lot of present ideas I have to come up with in a short period of time.
We don’t mean to diminish the importance of anniversaries. We just aren’t really sure what we can do to properly commemorate it. Right now we use it as an excuse to eat out (sometimes fancier than we might on a normal basis), but although we always go out, it’s not always to somewhere nice. And given that we go out occasionally anyway (just last week we went to the restaurant that last year we went to for our anniversary dinner), sometimes it doesn’t feel that much more special.
I know this is yet again one of those things that’ll change when we have kids. We’ll need to get out and do something just for ourselves once in a while, and our anniversary will be one of those precious excuses. It’ll even be more than an excuse: it’s a day to commemorate our relationship and to focus on us, something that’ll be harder to do once we’re busier with children.
It’s not that I think it’s unimportant how long Jon and I have been married. Every year is an accomplishment, every year greater than the last. One of the reasons why it’s messed up in my head is although it’s our fourth wedding anniversary this year, it’ll be nine years since we’ve been together. Next year we’ll be celebrating five years of marriage, and ten years together. It seems a little skewed.
But it’s also that, given that we have ample free time right now, we focus on our marriage all of the time. I don’t want to take just one day out of the year and set it aside for Jon and me. I know how invaluable that’ll be later, but right now, I feel like I should treat Jon specially every day, because I have the luxury of doing so.
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*(The above image by markuso is from freedigitalphotos.net).