I found out that the gift associated with ten years of marriage is tin. I wonder if some old timey wife was asked by some other old timey wife what the gift for ten years was when they started this whole thing and the first old timey wife blurted out TIN! because it was the closest sounding thing to ten. Because that's all the sense that you can muster after a decade of marriage. Loose word associations shouted emphatically.
This year has been a bit of a bitch. Trump was elected, which totally undermined my "Listen, there's gonna be a woman president in the White House, which means things are gonna change in this house" proclamation a few months ago. We merged our finances and got a joint checking account and started doing a budget, which means now you know how much I spend on crafts and I know how much you spend on video games. But perhaps this year is our most significant because this is the year that we got marital property.
We bought a house, which feels so adult I still don't know how it happened. There was some crying and sleep disturbances on my end and a lot of extra shifts on your end, but somehow we turned "unexpected FOR SALE sign in the front yard" into "a SOLD sign." I packed everything, you called all the utilities, we adopted electronic signatures, and now, thanks to our student loans and this new mortgage, we are a million dollars in debt. Ahhhh, the American Dream.
This year has shown us physically what a decade of marriage can do, too. Our most intimate touches come during an application of Tiger Balm to my neck or during a rub of your right butt cheek to get that knot that wakes you up in the middle of the night out of your ass. You are dosing yourself with round-the-clock ibuprofen and Tums, which is a far stretch from the Diet Mountain Dew and cigarettes that you were dosing yourself with when I first met you. At night, while we watch the political segments and sailing shows you cue up on YouTube, I stand against the wall rolling a tennis ball into my neck while you roll your ass on a foam cylinder on the living room floor. It's all very romantic.
But not quite as romantic as the day we both showed up with CVS bags full of hair regrowth products bought on independent shopping trips. When we do things like that, when we are so peculiarly in sync, that's when marriage is freaky romantic.
Our friend Erik predicted this year would be our last while we were all on vacation in Washington together. You were doing that cagey animal thing that you do on vacations with other people and just being le miserable and I was ignoring it, and therefore you. When we did speak, we were a bickering old married couple. When he told us our future, I told him it most certainly would not be our last year because I am too stubborn for that. Now we vacillate between "Too bad this is our last year, huh?" when we're having fun and "Thank god we only have one more year of this left, huh?" when we're making it suck.
If this is our last year, if you die of ass pain or my head falls off my chronically kinked neck, I want you to know that being married to you is the most amazing thing I have done in my life. I have learned so much about what I value and what I need and what I expect, of myself and others. I have learned that, despite what you say, I am an amazing wife and our relationship is the most powerful thing either of us has been a part of. I have been on adventures I thought were available only to more exceptional people. I still laugh until I cry from a look you'll throw my way or a silly thing you'll say, and I still crawl into your embrace when I need a break from the world around us. Like after that dream I had that a couple of nights ago where we were in a mass shooting at a doctor's office. You are my sanctuary. I bet you're made of tin.
Happy anniversary, Pop. I love you.
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