WHY did we choose to be married on Memorial Day weekend? (For the record our actual wedding day, May 25, 1996, was a Saturday.)
Don’t know.
Haven’t been able to trace the logic on that one back to it’s origin.

Certainly the date didn’t mean anything to either of us beforehand. It wasn’t the anniversary of our official engagement, it’s not either of our birthdays although mine is next week. We didn’t graduate on May 25th, we didn’t start shacking up on May 25th, we didn’t move anywhere, adopt any pets…. And, for the record, we didn’t realize that the 25th of May is somewhere around Memorial Day weekend until AFTER we were married and we were in San Diego on our honeymoon trying to get to a national park that you have to access through a corner of a naval base and national cemetery. A VERY crowded place on Monday May 27th, 1996. Some days we’re a little dim.

Andrew and I have been together for 19 years. We decided to get married on a early spring trip to Hawaii in 1995. Joan was showing us the safe, installed in response to a recent break-in, in which she kept the family jewelry. I dutifully inspected the safe, admired its clever camouflage, and went back to reading my book. Andrew and Joan did some further rootling in the safe, I heard Joan mumble something and Andrew’s reply of “I don’t know, I’ll ask her.”
Andrew came to me with a ring, gold with rubies, and asked if it would fit. I was sitting in a dining room chair, he was kneeling on the carpet beside me. I tried the ring on my right hand, he told me that was the wrong hand.
It wasn’t very romantic on my part (remember the part about me being a little dim sometimes?), but I goggled at him and asked what he meant at which point he took the ring off my right ring finger, put it on my left, and asked if I would marry him…..
Well, y’all know the answer.

A while back someone on my online DVM site (both a professional and a social networking site) asked whether or not those of us who are married consider our marriage to be “perfect” and why. I answered in the affirmative and gave the following reasons.
It’s not suited to everyone’s morals, but the shacking up period (as my maternal grandmother would have put it) was a great test for marriage. We got a chance to see each other’s foibles before making anything permanent…. and decided we wanted to keep it permanent anyway.

I am his, as he is my best friend. There is no one -NO ONE- I would rather spend time with. Which is not to say that we don’t have our own passions. I garden obsessively, he dissects computers and shoots zombies. I wouldn’t dream of asking him to participate in the gardening (which he views as a somewhat pernicious perversion on my part) and he wouldn’t dream of asking me to participate in the computers and zombie fest (which I view as drop dead boring). We respect each others’ individuality, but love our duality with a deep and abiding passion.

We share. I loathe taking out the garbage so he does it. He can’t get his head around doing laundry so I do it (I find it soothing really). He cleans the cat box, I clean the bedroom. He maintains the house’s technology, I maintain the pets. He does the majority of the cooking, I take care of the finances. While both of us are willing to take on the other’s chores (except for me taking on the technology, I’m only barely capable of using the remote for the TV) neither of us expects help with our responsibilities.

We impress each other. I am utterly in awe of what he can do –the art, the computer geeking. He thinks that what I do is just drop-jawed amazing.

We support each other. He is willing to be THE BIG MAN and deal with scary noises in the middle of the night, to say nothing of spiders and the odd cockroach. I understand that my BIG MAN is utterly incapable of helping me vaccinate cats, snap the necks of the mice for the snakes, or clean up cat puke.

It helps that each of us genuinely likes the other’s family and that our families like each other. And it helps that both of us had enough of being lonely in our youth that we’re constantly aware of how grateful we are to be with the other. Not a week goes by when one of us doesn’t thank the other for participating in this relationship…. to say nothing of being saved from the dating scene. UGH!

Happy anniversary sweetie.