Happy Anniversary!

Marriage is filled with mysticism. Women are cultured to dream about and it's spoken about in glowing, poetic terms throughout their youth. Frankly, sometimes right up until they actually GET married. Men hear the opposite message and are trained to think that marriage is this foreboding, restrictive part of your life that you should delay for as long as possible. The fact of the matter is that marriage, quite often, is neither of those things and the myths surrounding a marriage are sometimes damaging to people perception of how they should interact with their spouse. This becomes highlighted around anniversary time where Hallmark and the Lifetime channel put forth this image of how you're supposed to celebrate your nuptial. For me and my wife, though, it much more of a celebration that reminds us of what made us a happy couple to begin with. Sometimes  it's romantic. Sometimes it's not. Let me explain.

My wife and I have a tradition that's very simple. We give each other simple gifts in accordance to the traditional anniversary gifts. This year is iron so we will both go out and get a simple item made from that metal. Nothing extravagant. On our actual anniversary, one of us is in charge of planning an activity for us to do. It may be a trip. It may be something right here in the city that we love. We take turns planning each year: she has even years and I have the odd ones (fitting, since I'm the odd one in the couple!). The thing about our anniversary dates is that it may not always fall into the category of what one does to mark the passing of another year of wedding bliss. Take this year: we went to Six Flags Great Adventures. Sounds weird right? Well if you know us for more that a few hours, you know that we LOVE roller coasters and one of our first dates was to GA. This year was the iron year and what better way to celebrate than to ride metal roller coasters all day (without the weekend crowds at that). That worked perfectly for us and we didn't get caught up trying to find an uber romantic spot for us to escape to or a super expensive restaurant just because it was our anniversary. That's not who we are as a couple.

And that's my real point. Your anniversary should reflect who you are as a pairing. If you ate at Wendy all year and Friday night was movie night, why are you trying to go to Cipriani's and buying 4 dozen roses for your anniversary dinner? It's a day that is supposed to remind you of your relationship not the relationships you see on the Bachelor! Find something fits you better. Now I'm not saying that you should go to nice places to eat ever but I believe you should do that on random days not days laden with implications and pretext. For instance, our anniversary dinner was at a place called Casa La Femme which is an Egyptian place that we found through restaurant week. It was perfect (I will be writing a blog about that too) but it was in no way ritzy. In fact, there was grass on the floor! But that suited us perfectly because we LOVE RestaurantWeek.  So my point again is to just to "do you" and celebrate your relationship in your own personal way, regardless of whether it falls into the romantic category or not.

These are my thoughts...what are yours?