It’s our wedding anniversary tomorrow. We’ll have been married for 20 years.
20 years ago tomorrow we travelled over to Coombe Abbey and in front of our closest family, said our vows and became husband and wife.
I can still remember so many details of that day clearly, and then our lovely honeymoon in Cyprus afterwards.
It doesn’t feel like 20 years have passed by since then, though the lines on my face are telling me otherwise!
We had been together for four years before we got married, and living together for around eighteen months. We were fresh faced and keen! I was 24, he was 25 and we had our whole lives ahead of us. We didn’t know what we might do, where our lives might take us, just that we wanted to embark on those adventures together.
Now that we’re 20 years on, I feel like a lot has changed, and then also nothing at all has changed.
We are living somewhere else, we are both in different jobs and of course we have Boo and Little Man, which is a fairly big change!
But at the heart of it, nothing has changed. He still makes me laugh, he still manages to surprise me, he is still my best friend, he still knows me like nobody else does and I still look forward to spending time with him.
We sync with each other, we can usually anticipate what the other wants or how they will react to any situation. We can look at one another and know what the other is thinking.
We have so much in common, and yet have very different temperaments and personalities. I am the sunshine to his rainy day. He is the calm to my storm.
It’s been 20 good years. It’s not been hard to be married. It was the easiest decision I ever made and it remains the easiest part of my life.
As I write this, I am trying to decide whether there has been one standout year or time together that has been our best, and I can’t really settle on any particular time. Maybe when we moved to our current house. Maybe our breaks with my brother and his wife. Maybe when the kids were born. Maybe our Disney World holidays. Maybe when we had Harry, or then Herbie. Lots of happy memories to look back on. Of course, there have been tough times too, but we have weathered them together.
Having the children has obviously made the biggest difference in our lives, in two ways. Firstly, the presence of the actual small humans themselves, and then the change in our circumstances as the Husband took on the roll of main breadwinner so I could be home with them and bring them up myself. This was a huge shift from my career-driven former self, in income, in dynamics and in motivation. But we have made it work.
We are going away this weekend to celebrate, just the two of us. We are both already looking forward to those hotel breakfasts and several cake stops as we mooch about the shops and take in the sights. We adore our kids of course, but we are looking forward to being just us for a few days, not mum and dad, and enjoying the leisurely pace and a little bit of peace!
Happy anniversary, Mr R, here’s to the next 20 years.
Congrats on 20 years!
Thanks so much!
This is so lovely to read Jocelyn. I can identify with much of what you said. Congratulations! …wishing you both many more happy years ahead.
(I love those hotel breakfasts too:))
Thanks so much, Mairead! Those breakfasts were good 🙂