Ten years already. I wrote a bit about this anniversary as it loomed back in January. Now, we’re here.
Our Decennial. To be celebrated with tin. Or aluminium, depending on sources. Not to be confused with next year when we’ll celebrate our Undecennial with steel, apparently. But the Spouse did better than either of those and he booked us a table at the restaurant where we went for our first anniversary. A wonderful, splurgy, delicious hit of romance. Perfect.
(And because it’s sometimes that kind of blog… I had a slice of lobster tart as an appetizer. I’d overheard the chef chatting with the folk at the next table and saying that it had turned out very nicely that day. That kind of humble recognition of fallibility convinced me to order a slice. As well as halibut for my main course with hollandaise sauce. And for dessert, a gorgeous lemon curd pannacotta with roasted rhubarb. A very celebratory table. Thanks for asking.)
I remember nine years ago, sitting there in the restaurant, perhaps a little awed by just how nice it all was. He passed me a card across the table, a lovely simple card with a floral line drawing. And the words still sounded fresh and new.
“To my Wife,” I read aloud. “Orchids. Lovely.”
“What?”
“Orchids. They are lovely.”
“Let me see.” He sounded really worried. And I wondered if I had made a mistake somehow. Maybe I’d got the flower wrong and that botanical error was high insulting? But no, they were definitely orchids. I handed the card across the table,and then he laughed. “I thought you said or kids. To my wife or kids. Like it was a flexible card.” We were still firmly in the no-babies-yet stage of our marriage then, and he had been aiming for romance not flexibility. This time around, mid-anniversary meal, he left the table to check his phone for messages from the babysitter.
I’m glad that’s what ten years on looks like for us.
Ten years has plenty of time for harder things than lobster tart. We’ve had our fill. Two transatlantic moves bringing joy and stress – three really, if you count moving home as well, which you probably should. Two postgraduate degrees and another one in the works. Job loss. Three congregations. Miscarriage. Job hunting. Seven (I think) abodes (not counting camping out with the in-laws). Job offers (these can count as hard things, too, believe you me). The saddening stage when friends whose weddings we celebrated are divorcing.
And those are the externals, events which crop up rather than the daily work of living together. There have also been all the inevitable workings through of being two different people learning to be together in one place. Our friend Peter – of the recent wedding celebrations – recently posted this quotation on facebook.
“There is value, when choosing a long-term partner, in realizing that you will inevitably be choosing a particular set of unsolvable problems that you’ll be grappling with for the next ten, twenty, or fifty years.”
The ensuing chatter of comments tackled the question of whether or not it was a depressing statement. Some though it was realistic or helpful, or even entertaining. Maybe it’s all three.
But I wonder instead about the positive side to this long-term grappling. Thinking of a partner’s personality as a set of problems prompts us to look for solutions. Maybe it also sets the partner as the problem. Which isn’t exactly an exercise in humility, is it? But maybe it’s better to think of parameters rather than problems. We all have limits and, when we choose to live together, we need to work out how those limits sit beside each other. There is a necessary creativity implied here, I think. Not to solve the problems, but rather together to build a flexible space where we can live at home with each other.
