Don't Wait—Celebrate!
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[0 Comment]Time really does fly. We were looking forward to a significant anniversary—our 50th—in just a little more than a year. Like most couples, we'd always celebrated our anniversary—sometimes routinely, other times with more pizzazz. Fifty years, we agreed, deserved something special. So we decided to mark the occasion with 50 celebrations scattered over the 12 months prior to the "big" day.
That's a lot of celebrating! We wondered if we could come up with, or even afford, 50 celebrations in a single year. But we decided to put our reservations on the back burner and go for it.
After years of counseling married couples, we know that celebrations are at the heart of a lively relationship. Marriage researchers have found that for a lasting and satisfying relationship you need at least three or four positive experiences for every negative one, so you can't celebrate your marriage too often.
Frequent celebrations also add excitement to marriage—we always have something to anticipate. For example, one of our celebrations was a special evening of dinner and theater with our family. While the dinner was great and the play outstanding, a good part of the fun was planning the event and looking forward to how much we'd enjoy it.
Our experience turned us into zealous advocates of frequent celebrations as a way to add excitement and richness to our marriage. Here are some guidelines we discovered that make celebrations both doable and memorable.
Celebrations don't have to be expensive, elaborate, or exotic. To be sure, we had a few that were. Our final celebration involved taking an Alaskan cruise with our entire family. It was expensive. It required elaborate planning. And it was an exotic experience for all. However, many of our celebrations were quite simple and virtually cost free. Once we assembled a jigsaw puzzle together. When our kids were still at home, we often had a family puzzle in the works. So we decided to honor this tradition and try one as a couple. We ambitiously chose a puzzle that took a couple weeks to complete. Our struggle to find the right pieces gave us many hours to reflect and talk about our life together.
Another inexpensive celebration tapped into one of Bob's loves—cartoons. We took a recent issue of the New Yorker, which featured cartoons about marriage and relationships, to our local Starbuck's. While sipping coffee and munching cookies, we discussed the various cartoons: Why did or didn't we find them funny? Which two did we like the best? What did our choices say about our sense of humor? We had a fun afternoon and it cost little.
Make room for both planned and spontaneous celebrations. Many of our celebrations were planned. They involved scheduling, making reservations, or buying tickets. But we also enjoyed many spur-of-the-moment celebrations—such as the day we were about to fire up our computers and settle down to work when we both admitted we were feeling weary and uninspired.
Originally published in: Marriage Partnership, 2005, Fall, Page 36
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