With an anniversary on a Monday, you don’t have that many choices about what to do: celebrate it on the weekend, because Monday’s a work day, lots of places are closed on Mondays, and you’d better celebrate early rather than late to avoid the miscommunication that your anniversary doesn’t matter, maybe celebrate twice, but which day do you give the card? The Saturday night of the celebration or on the actual day of the anniversary?
Oh so many ways to get it wrong.
And so many ways to get it right.
The Beginning
We choose an anniversary weekend. A “couples day” on Saturday where we hang out together doing regular stuff and errands. Enormous bouquet with roses and lilies awaiting on the front step when we return. Bonus points abounding, and we haven’t even gone out to celebrate yet. A dress-up night with a R-O-M-A-N-T-I-C dinner Saturday night; dress up clothes, white table cloth, live piano and bass duo in the background, Italian food, the food of love, the slow tempo of a meal unrushed. Sunday feeling all yummy and smug (ala Bridget Jones) about ourselves and our connection and our marriage. Monday, the actual anniversary date, with cards and expressions of love and gratitude as we head out to work.
We come home early, choose the fanciest restaurant in town for appetizers and a drink (all we can afford from a place like that), dress up yet again, and bask in the other-worldly-ness of a restaurant with more wait staff than customers, interchangeable black-clad silent ninja servers, water servers, bread servers, crumb removers, napkin drapers, a pianist without a tip jar, flavors so perfectly balanced and nuanced that you wonder if you have ever really eaten before, the unasked-for and surprise celebration treat from the kitchen takes your breath away with elegant simplicity and stunning presentation, the valet service without a ticket because when your check is delivered to your table, the valets are informed, black-clad footmen hold open each door as you walk out the front door and gingerly place you in your waiting car.
We ask the main server to take our picture, and my husband, who never smiles in photos, has two tiny upturned curves at the corners of his mouth. He’s been transported to a time and place where marriage is this easy and this good.
Of course, we don’t live in that place every minute of every day. But we spend a lot of time there, even in our fiscally reserved and mundane days. We do as much laundry as the next household, I imagine. We have bills that come from nowhere and suck the last ounce of possible savings from our account. We have the requisite loving but dysfunctional families and friends, and we are right smack dab in the middle of all of our own loving and dysfunctional patterns that no one else would want to live with that we tend to navigate without too much unnecessary pain and suffering. We’ve got pasts, and baggage, and middle-aged bodies that are more apt to disappoint than deliver. We have as uncertain a future as any other couple – what will it be that ends this marriage? Death? Of one of us or our love? Challenges we won’t be able to surmount? We are married today because we are married today and we make the requisite choices that make it a marriage worth celebrating, not just on anniversaries, but on the days in between.
It’s Tuesday, and the anniversary weekend is over. We ate every last morsel we could get in, told stories about meeting and falling in love, got confused about what happened in which year, forgot where we spent our first anniversary, wondered about what would have happened if any of the moments leading up to our unexpected connection hadn’t, got lost in the existential wonder of how lives are made up by the tiniest of moments, layered and layered and tasted and savored until in the end, we lick the plate clean and sigh in satisfaction at the end of a really fine meal.
The End