Silver Anniversary

Happy Anniversary! My spouse has been legally tied to me for 25 years, and coping with me for 30+ years. Hats off to him! We don't usually celebrate our wedding anniversary. The reasons are complicated, but for me, we got married to have children. It is debatable if that is a good, bad, or indifferent reason to marry, but it is what it is. The reason I choose to ignore it is that it isn't the significant turn in my relationship with my spouse. At the point we wedded I had already done very significant life changing things with him--like buying a house and filing our albums together. I did not see how the mere act of marriage would change the relationship that we had. If we wanted to stay together, we would, and if we didn't we wouldn't, and I did not see how marriage would change that. I still feel that way. While my relationship with my spouse is very important to me, and co-parenting is definitely a demanding job that is best done by two people who are allies, the fact that we are married isn't of paramount importance to me. Which is why I was a bit late to the table when it comes to support for same sex marriage. I just didn't understand it properly. Now that I see it as a civil rights issue, I have a whole different attitude. I have always said--preached, my children will say--that it is most important for the majority to be vocal about rights for all people, especially under-represented minorities. Why? Because there is no appearance of self gain in the stance. But truthfully, we all gain when the playing field is level for everyone--we are a long long way from that being true, but that is the goal. So my support for same sex marriage brought me to a point where I better value my own marriage--hey, maybe this is a good thing! My eldest son couldn't wait to be married, so at least my views didn't get passed on, as of yet, to the next generation. In any case, today it is 25 years that I have been married, which sounds like a very long time indeed.