By Adam Stewart
From the Newsroom
This weekend, Michelle and I are going to celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary.
To be honest, it kind of snuck up on me this year. It isn’t that I’m bad at remembering important dates, or that I’ve overlooked the importance of it, or that we don’t have anything planned.
No, I think the reason it snuck up on me is because we have big plans for our anniversary, but we aren’t actually doing those plans until later this spring, and that has occupied a lot of attention that we would have put on our actual anniversary.
We’re planning an anniversary trip. The details aren’t important now, but I’ll write about the trip afterward.
Thinking about the fact that we’ve been married for five years, two conflicting thoughts come to mind.
How has it been five years already? I can picture Michelle walking down the aisle in her wedding dress as clear as if it was a week ago. I remember how I felt, butterflies in my stomach but knowing I was exactly where I wanted to be.
But also, how has it only been five years? We have done so much since our wedding, lived so much life together, been through ups and downs and more ups and downs—more ups than downs, I’m happy to say.
It’s a weird, paradoxical feeling to have those seemingly incompatible senses of the passage of time. Fortunately, it’s a difference that I don’t have to reconcile. Just acknowledge, “Huh, that’s weird.”
Marriage has been dramatically better than the single life. Like I said before, there have been ups and downs to it, but that’s an easy trade to make in return for always having someone on your team. I always have someone I can celebrate good times with, to share the weight of a hard day or week. Even chores feel less like a chore together.
I think the best part of marriage—or of serious relationships more broadly—is getting to dream and plan for the future together, and then see those dreams and plans become reality. In five years of marriage, and a little over seven years as a couple, we’ve already seen a bunch of plans come to fruition. With our upcoming anniversary trip, we’re about to accomplish another shared dream, maybe the biggest since our wedding.
I love it when a plan comes together.
And we aren’t about to run out of dreams to dream and plans to plan anytime soon. We already have ideas for retirement.
Adam Stewart is the assistant news editor of The Hutchinson Tribune. He can be reached at adam@hutchtribune.com.