Celebrations: When It’s About More Than the Celebrating
For the last few decades, my birthday and wedding anniversary have fallen on the same date. A wise decision? That’s debatable. But one thing isn’t. This year, I have an unexpected surgery scheduled on my birthday. And our anniversary. Something I didn’t ask for and wouldn’t have chosen. This may go down as a “for worse” day for a celebration. But there is an unexpected benefit to this trifecta of events: it’s reopened my eyes to perhaps the biggest benefit of all of a long partnership. I realized celebrations are really about much more than the celebrating.
I’ll admit my first reaction was not a graceful one. But somewhere in sitting with it, I found myself thinking less about the day itself and more about what an anniversary is actually for. Not the dinner, not the toast, not the card. The thing underneath all of that. And the more I turned it over, the more I realized the answer has very little to do with celebration at all.
The part of the vow we don’t rehearse
Almost every wedding vow, in some form, includes a version of the phrase “for better or for worse.” We say it standing in nice clothes, surrounded by people we love, at the most “for better” moment either person is likely to experience for years. Nobody rehearses the “worse” part. Nobody stages a version of the ceremony where the room goes quiet and someone says, picture a waiting room, picture a diagnosis, picture the year everything is upended.
And yet that’s the half of the vow doing the real work. The better half doesn’t need much from either person. Good years are easy to show up for. It’s the other half, the one we say almost in passing, on the happiest day of our lives, that ends up defining what the marriage actually is.
Anniversaries as evidence, not just celebration
I think most of us treat anniversaries as a yearly return to the beginning. We revisit the wedding, the story of how we met, the photos. It’s a lovely tradition, but it can also quietly miss the point. A marriage isn’t proven on the day it starts. It’s proven in the ordinary and difficult years that follow, the ones with no photographer present.
A long partnership isn’t really evidenced by the wedding day at all. It’s evidenced by the fifteenth year, or the twentieth, when something hard shows up uninvited, on a random Tuesday or on the actual anniversary itself, and one person still shows up for the other without being asked twice. That’s not a smaller kind of love than the wedding day kind. It might be the realest version of it. The wedding day is the promise. Every hard year after is the proof.
Celebrations over the decades
Something shifts in a long marriage or partnership that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived inside one for a couple of decades. The early years tend to be about attraction, compatibility, building a life together, the future tense. Later, it becomes less about building forward and more about something sturdier and less glamorous, showing up. Being the person who sits in the waiting room. Being the person who remembers what the doctor said so the other one doesn’t have to.
That shift can sound like a loss if you’re only looking for the early, electric version of love. But I’d argue it’s closer to what the whole thing was for in the first place. Nobody makes a lifelong promise because they expect an easy life. We make it because we suspect, correctly, that we will eventually need someone whose presence isn’t optional. Not someone who loves us when it’s convenient, but someone whose commitment was made in advance, before either of you knew exactly what you’d be asking of each other.
This year’s version of the promise
This year, my anniversary is going to look like my husband in a waiting room instead of across a table from me at a restaurant. No toast, probably no card exchanged at the right moment, no nice photo for the year. And I’ve come to think that might be the truest anniversary there is. Not despite the circumstances, but because of them.
Because the version of the vow that matters isn’t the one either of us said out loud all those years ago. It’s the one being kept quietly, in a room neither of us would have chosen, on a day that isn’t going to look like celebration. That’s not a smaller anniversary than the ones with cake. I suspect it’s the whole point of the ones with cake.
If you’re in a long partnership too
If you’ve been with someone for years, decades even, I’d guess you have your own version of this. A year the anniversary didn’t look like the wedding day. A year the “for worse” half of the promise got called in instead of the for better half. I don’t think those years are the exception to a good marriage or partnership. I’ve started to think they might be the actual definition of one.
The wedding day tells you two people were in love enough to promise each other a future. Everything after that, especially the hard parts, tells you whether the promise was real. I’m grateful, on a birthday I didn’t plan for, to find out mine still is.
