Stefan and I celebrated our marriage’s first birthday last night. Yay us! We took ourselves and our marriage out to Brother’s Pizza, a local favorite restaurant, where we ordered our standard meal: a pitcher of Bud, garden salad with chunky bleu cheese dressing, and Tony’s Special. For dessert, Stefan ordered a homemade cannoli, while I opted for cheesecake slathered with strawberries. The waitress brought out the cheesecake with a lit candle on the top, and I blew out the candle on behalf of our marriage.
We spent the meal as we usually do, discussing the activities of the day, and planning for the weeks ahead. But we also talked about the past year, and how although it’s been peppered with lows and highs, with seemingly more lows than highs, it doesn’t really matter. The lows weren’t a result of our interaction with each other; they were caused by external forces. In the whole scheme of things, when looking at the bigger picture and seeing how we’re going to be together for the next 30 or 40 years, a lower-than-expected year isn’t all that surprising or even unexpected. In fact, it matters very little.
As any other thing in life, a marriage is susceptible to falling victim to entropy. Vows don’t make us immune to the nuances that can eat away at a great relationship. We can protect our marriage by communicating more than we think is necessary. The more we practice communicating, the better we will become at it, and the stronger our marriage will become because of it.
Afterwards, we didn’t feel like going home just yet, so we headed to Books-A-Million, where we cruised the aisles for reference books on editing. In the interim, Stefan spotted a stack of “I support Marriage” magnetic bumper stickers that the bookstore was selling for $3.99 a pop. This political issue is a bit of a hot-button for both of us (we do support marriage, otherwise we wouldn’t be married, but we don’t support it in the way the bumper sticker implied, which was that marriage should be restricted to one man and one woman). This served as a further reminder that we moved to the wrong part of town. Somewhere during the course of the evening, the entire stack of bumper stickers managed to fall down between some bookshelves. I have no idea how that happened, but when the store closes for good and the bookshelves are dismantled, the magnetic bumper stickers will reappear. Hopefully the store will never move or go out of business, and the bumper stickers will stay there for a long, long time.
At the checkout counter, we were again bombarded with religiously charged material (apparently this Books-A-Million is making a statement as to which political side they fall on), and Stefan spotted some little charms with pink plastic sapphires stuck to them. Engraved on the side of the charm was, “Best Friends” repeatedly, in a circle. We got a good laugh out of reminiscing back to the days when childhood friends referred to each other as BFF, or Best Friends Forever. That got us thinking about our relationship again, and on a whim, we purchased the charms and put them on our key chains. Now we can declare to the entire world (like our wedding rings and Stefan’s tattoo isn’t enough) that we indeed are Best Friends Forever.
Maybe some folks would roll their eyes or laugh at us, but we don’t care. If we remember nothing else of our first anniversary, we will remember it as the day we got our BFF charms.
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