Sixteen Years Together

Today my husband and I will celebrated our 16^th wedding anniversary. It is amazing how time passes with the blink of an eye.

When we got married, I weighed about 120 pounds. And yes, I thought I was heavy even then. Fast forward sixteen years, two kids and about a zillion pounds later, one thing hasn’t changed. That man I married still makes me feel like I am the only woman on Earth for him.

This evening, we will spend a few hours alone together. We will have a nice dinner and listen to some good music performed by an old friend of mine. We can talk and laugh about the past, present and future…. and like the clock striking midnight in Cinderella, we will head back home to our beautiful ordinary life so gratefully knowing how blessed we have been all these years.

 

To me, I feel that wedding anniversaries are most enjoyable when the couple has stood the test of time, faced the storm and the rain and yet are still together. And it is such a joyous moment when family and friends come congratulating them for having made it so far…. That is exactly where my husband and I are.

Our marriage may have been a bumpy ride with many speed breakers but that is what that has made us circumvent those obstacles.

My friends often quote my marriage as an example of a perfect marriage but what they fail to see is that the honest truth is that my marriage is actually the coolest adventure that two people ever took!

The adventure that most would think are only stories they would read in books which may not even be true but for both my husband and I, we know it is for real because we are the characters in that story…

A girl from a small but bustling city, meeting a guy from a small quiet town 12,000 miles away from her. How did they meet? Over the internet. The adventures of traveling half way around the world to see if this connection of love was as true as it was in real life than over the internet. The heartaches of leaving everything I had built behind and not to mention family and friends so I could build a new life in a country (America) I had always dreamed of moving to. The pains of adjusting to a new country where I would be an ‘alien’. The pains of settling immigration matters.

But we did it together. We made it work because we worked together. There was never an “I” or “Me” or “Yours”…. It was always “Us” and “Ours”. That’s the difference.

Imagine, we made a long distance relationship work long before there was Facebook, Skype, or even Whatsapp. We depended on emails, mIRC, messenger, and tons of calling cards which we spent a fortune on. But we made it work.

And as my husband and I continue to grow old together, I know for a fact that every wrinkle would signify a beautiful memory that we have shared together as husband and wife.

Our marriage is nowhere near perfect. We fight like any other married couples do. But we work things out and move on. The important thing is, we support each other and encourage each other to be better people and to do the best we can whether as parents or at work.

I hope my husband will know that every time when we do fight or argue, I may have a thousand reasons to be angry at him….but I also want him to remember that I also have a million reasons to love him too.

Through it all, the best thing that we have done together is raising two beautiful smart children.

Nevertheless, on our 16^th anniversary, I would like my husband to know how much I have enjoyed annoying him all this time and how excited I am to keep doing so in the years to come…. *wink*

When I got married, I did not only get a husband but a best friend.

So my dear friends, if you would be so kind to raise your glasses with me: to sixteen years of marriage and a lifetime of good health, love and happiness.