Celebrating Anniversaries

I am a firm believer that everything needs maintenance, including relationships.   One of the easiest ways to maintain a relationship is to celebrate anniversaries.

I'm not talking about just the big anniversaries either.  I mean celebrate all sorts of anniversaries.

My husband and I celebrate the anniversary of our first date, our first dinner date, our engagement, our wedding (of course), the day we bought our house together, and random other events.

The celebration isn't what is important.   What is important is getting back in touch with the person you were and the emotion you felt at the time.

By reaching back in time, and feeling the excitement, the nervousness, the anticipation, you have the chance to fall in love all over again.  That adds layers to the relationship, the mature and settled love melds with the new and slightly crazy love, and everything is shiny again.

And this is not just true for romantic relationships.  Friendships can celebrate anniversaries as well.   With friendships, it is more of the "Remember when we went to see Dirty Dancing?" or "Remember the 8th grade dance?" but it is still reconnecting your past self with your present self, and reminding yourself of how valuable the other person and the relationship is to you.

For most of us, we have friends that we have lost touch with over the years.  With the advent of social media, many of us have had the opportunity to reconnect with old friends, and strengthen the bonds with the friends we have stayed in touch with.

There is a popular meme that makes it's way around Facebook regularly that talks about the best friends being the friend that you may not talk to for months, but when you do talk it is like no time has passed at all.

I totally agree with that - but in the interest of living the best life I can possibly construct for myself - why not try harder to talk more often to the people that matter in my life?

Why not mark special days in your life and the lives of the people you care about, and dedicate some effort to celebrating the anniversaries of the special people and events in your life with the people who are important to you?

We get one trip through life.  It is easy to get busy with things that don't really matter, that don't add pleasure or meaning, at the expense of meaningful investment in our relationships.

Celebrating anniversaries of happy times with the people you shared those happy times with multiplies the pleasure to layer the memory with all the faces you and your loved ones have had through the years.

And every happy memory is one more treasure to cherish when inevitably, people leave this plane of existence.

There is something to celebrate every day, and someone special to share it with.   May you find the special in today, and celebrate it with someone important to you.