Last week, Moses and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. Ten years has the peculiar quality of seeming at once to be a really long time-as in, wow we've been married forever--and also a very short time--as in wow already?, that went fast. When we were preparing for marriage, we wrote letters to our future selves talking about what our expectations for marriage were and what we were feeling at the time. I confess that I was more than a little relieved to discover that we chose a crappy pen to write these letters and the ink has faded to illegibility. Thankfully we were better at choosing partners than choosing writing instruments. We were 24 when we got married. Last week we both had the same reaction when considering our 24-year-old selves: "24? What were thinking? We knew nothing, we were idiots, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves in for. We were still in school, for crying out loud. Our combined annual income was just over a tenth of what it is now. Did anybody try to warn us? Were we just not paying attention?" Thankfully our 24-year-old selves seemed to have stumbled into a pretty good life-I think that after 10 years we can officially count ourselves as in for the long haul.
I've been wanting to write something that reflects on ten years of marriage, what it means and what I've learned. On our eighth wedding anniversary, I posted our wedding vows and the ones that I would take had we written our own-after being married 8 years-and I hold true to those.
Well, I try. I don't manage it everyday, but I think I get there more days than not.
It turns out that, for me, our 10th anniversary was not so much a time to reflect on the deeper truths of marriage, but simply a time to revel in the years we've had together, and that is difficult to express. Then, today, we had a virtual conversation (Moses is traveling, thus the text messages, not that we haven't been known to text message across the living room) that sums it up nicely:
M: Flight from NC to DC delayed
K: Sorry about your flight. Miss you already.
M: I love you. Equal parts teq (tequila), tripsec (triple sec), lime, sweeten to taste, add ice wait 1 min.
In case you missed it, that conversation was about how draining it is to deal with a 7-year-old chatter-box non-stop all day without someone to deflect the 7-year-old's attention. And Moses got it, and he made me laugh, and that's what's great about 10 years.
