Weddings are important, but anniversaries are better

This is a little different for me, but I’m going here.  I have been thinking about this for a while, and in honor of my own 6th anniversary and my sister’s upcoming wedding, I had a few things to say.

(Please note that exactly nothing I am about to say applies to my sister…she is probably the very first bride I have ever in my life met who has a right and true perspective on her own wedding day and isn’t taking anything too seriously.  Me six years ago could take a lesson from my sister)

Weddings are important.  Weddings are awesome.  They are an incredible day, and a fun time for all.

But then they are over.

And I feel like we might forget that.  A wedding is a day.  And I think some people might think too highly of their own weddings.  I think it’s cultural.  It’s become a phenomenon, this outdo everyone else’s wedding competition.  This need to have the best, the most, the greatest of everything.  The need to have a dozen showers and an entire bachelor and bachelorette weekend getaway.  It’s reached a level of crazy.  Andy and I sat down and tried to calculate how much we had spent on tux rentals, bachelor parties, dresses and shower gifts since we’ve been married.  The number was pretty ridiculous….and our friends tend to be more on the conservative side.  I know a couple who between the two of them probably spent close to five grand on bachelor/bachelorette weekends alone last year…with the same group of people over and over just for someone else’s wedding in their circle of friends.

Weddings are important.  Weddings are awesome. 

But they are one day.

I think anniversaries are getting the short end of the stick.  Anniversaries are important.  Anniversaries are a thing to be celebrated.  Anniversaries are awesome.

You want to know why?

Anyone can get married.  Not everyone gets to the anniversaries.  Even fewer have fun and happy anniversaries.  Look at the Hollywood portrayal of weddings.  Then look at the Hollywood portrayal of anniversaries.  We have a real problem.  Weddings are fun and fantasy like…anniversaries are treated like a waste of time, or made into a joke….”Oh look, this man forgot his anniversary again.  Slap to the head…D’oh.”

But anniversaries are so much more than that.  An anniversary is a celebration of the year you just lived together.  Some years, it might feel like a celebration of a year you survived.  Others, it’s a toast to the best time of your life.  Often, it’s both at once.  But it’s a celebration all right.  A celebration of what you have done together.  The battle scars you have gained together, the joy you have celebrated.  The ways in which your marriage has grown, and changed, and molded, and shaped everything.  You, your spouse, your family, your lives. 

Anniversaries are important.  Anniversaries are awesome.  Anniversaries celebrate everything.

So let’s hear it for anniversaries.  Because they rock.

I started writing this the day after my own anniversary, back in May, but it got lost in the shuffle, so I’m posting it now.