Five

Five Year Anniversary_feistyharriet_Nov 2016 (1)

Five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes…how do you measure a year?

…Measure in love.

Five years ago today Mr. Blue Eyes and I eloped, telling essentially no one. We married in a cramped room of the very unromantic City and County building, under yellowy-green fluorescent lighting; the ceremony was performed by a stranger woman named Antigone who wore Chacos with her official robes. Honestly, it was perfect. My Dad and Stepmom were our witnesses and took us out to brunch afterwards, the next day we had Thanksgiving Dinner with my whole family and didn’t tell a soul that we were officially hitched.

The story leading up to our secretive elopement is a good one, but that’s a story for another day.

Five years. Two million, six hundred twenty-eight thousand minutes (yes, I did the math). The vast majority of those minutes we spent apart, in different states and different time zones. I haven’t done the math recently, but of the almost six years we’ve been together, we’ve only lived in the same state for two of them. We struggled with the distance, and sometimes we thrived with the distance. We have made sacrifices for each other, supported each other, and stood by each other through some glowing good times, and through a lot of impossibly difficult ones.

I went back to my old, defunct blog (RIP, Old Blog!), and looked up what I wrote about marrying Mr. Blue Eyes in the first place. This, in particular, struck me as 100% true then and 100% true now:

There are two things, in particular, that I love about Blue Eyes.

Thing 1: He is kind, he is one of those people who is just nice. He is polite and friendly and goes out of his way to help others. He is the kind of man who cares about people, and it shows. Babies and little kids flock to him and my niece, age almost-3, asks about him every single time I see her and runs up to him for a hug any time he’s around. He is sweet to me, he has yet to raise his voice or even speak to me with any kind of anger or disrespect. (Okay, in five years this may not be 100% true anymore, but it’s probably 95% true, and that’s still an A.) Sure, we’ve had disagreements and differing opinions but we can disagree without it turning nasty. Even on big things, even on emotional things, he is kind.

Thing 2: He sees me as I really am, flaws and all, and he loves me anyway. He has not put me up on a pedestal where I feel I am unable to be myself, he does not roll his eyes or get bothered or miffed when I have my less than stellar moments (and believe me, I have them). He has this amazing ability to encourage the best of me and simultaneously, he is not disappointed or embarrassed or put out when I am just my regular, normal, not-best self. I am geeky and goofy and silly and quirky without worrying that he will think less of me. I have baggage and issues and unbloggable things that affect me in really horrible ways. I am snarky and sassy and feisty and stubborn–and sometimes downright pig-headed–but even on my bad days, or bad weeks I know that his feelings won’t change. (And yes, after those bad days and bad weeks I admit my pig-headedness, apologize and try again.) Blue Eyes encourages the best parts of me to grow and develop, but he does not demand I change or insist that if I just tweak this or that, or get over this hurdle or that, or, you know, completely re-prioritize my life so he can really love me and then we can be happy. He loves me just the way I am; he is happy with me, and I with him, just as we are.

 

Five Year Anniversary_feistyharriet_Nov 2016 (2)

Five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes. Multiplied five times over.

Happy Anniversary, my blue eyed love. Here’s to the next five years, which will undoubtably be full of laughter and tears, good times and heartache, adventure and tedium, anger and hurt and overwhelming joy. But, most importantly, full of love.

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17 thoughts on “Five

  1. Pingback: If we went to lunch… – Feisty Harriet

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