A Decade of Us

This post is a tech­ni­cal­ly a cou­ple of days late for our tenth wed­ding anniver­sary, but you can skip all the stereo­types about the hus­band who for­gets that sort of thing. That’s not at all why it’s late. Rather, Angela and I were off on a fam­i­ly vaca­tion and not both­er­ing to post it to the inter­net (that occa­sion­al­ly hap­pens to me).

Despite the most won­der­ful ten years of my life (and hope­ful­ly Angela agrees on that), we did­n’t cel­e­brate with a fan­cy din­ner. Instead—in the wee ear­ly hours of the morning—we found our­selves shar­ing take-out piz­za in a hotel room bed with our kids while clink­ing cheap-yet-over­priced wine in a pair of plas­tic cups. We decid­ed to take the kids on our first big fam­i­ly vaca­tion and went to Dis­ney World in Flori­da. While not a tra­di­tion­al date, even for us, we’ve always done things our own way and there­fore it seemed fit­ting. Besides, our kids are as much a part of our mar­riage as any­thing so it felt right to include them (though they did­n’t get any of the wine; there was­n’t enough in the lit­tle hotel bot­tle to share). Our actu­al anniver­sary was spent on a long dri­ve home. We joked we’d spend an hour on the road for each year we’d been mar­ried. In a way, also fit­ting as we spent the day after our wed­ding on a long car ride back home to Vir­ginia. I don’t think we’ll try that for any future anniver­saries, though1.

Not to stretch the dri­ving metaphor too far, but it has been an amaz­ing jour­ney these past ten years (and the years togeth­er even before then…). I’ve got a friend and part­ner. Any­time I described a dream of mine, she’s nev­er tried to stop me but instead asked “when do you want to get start­ed?” She’s not only sup­port­ed me but pushed me to always be bet­ter and do more. Every­thing good that has hap­pened to me since we’ve been togeth­er has been in a very large part because of her. To have had a friend like that even for a short time is a gift and she’s been mar­ried to me for ten short years (and two days).

Here’s to ten times ten more, should we be here for so long.

1. We do plan to go out for a qui­et date night to share a nice din­ner lat­er this evening. [↩]