Choosing an Anniversary
A bonus fun part about getting married is you get to actually choose an anniversary.
You get to look at the calendar and choose a day to get married. That day will then become your anniversary + should you choose to do so, [and why would you not? ] you can celebrate it every year for the rest of your lives. Pressure is on.
Kyle + I chose our wedding anniversary based on a whole bunch of things, and feel free to take this as advisory or fun, I just wanted to share how we decided on our anniversary especially as our previous anniversary just passed and I'm actually a little bummed we didn't get to celebrate it this year. But I'm very excited about our big first wedding anniversary coming up!
Our dating anniversary.
A genuine first anniversary depends on a lot of fate + luck + being smitten + retrospection (i.e. it's usually looking back on a specific date or incident that you feel that was the moment that you were a couple.) Our genuine first anniversary fell on April Fools Day. Here's how that happened:
Kyle asked me out for dinner + a movie. He thought really hard about it. Well, she's a girl who's into the arts, maybe she'd like a movie? She also seems to be a bit of a foodie, maybe dinner?
K: "Want to go to dinner and a movie?"
E: "What like on a date?" dripping with disdainful-actually-I'm-too-fun-and-carefree-for-official-dating-nonsense
K: "Yeah. On a date." filled with confidently-I'm-a-catch-get-over-yourself
E: "Ok. Yeah, let's go on a date."
We made plans to meet on Tuesday after my World of Chemistry Food class (I name drop that I was attending this class as it was my favourite ever undergrad class. Anyone want to know why M&Ms melt in your mouth not your hand? I know! I know!)
Then I realized.
Tuesday was APRIL FOOLS DAY.
Being the very impressively confident, especially considering my age, woman that I was, I immediately came to the dramatic conclusion that this whole thing was a months-in-the-making elaborate prank between Kyle and all of his friends to leave me in Carrie-on-Prom-Night April Fools Day joke + I spent the whole day freaking the fuck out about humiliating it was going to be when Kyle didn't show.
He showed. To say I was relieved is an understatement.
But the lead-up-internal-drama did make our anniversary crazy easy to remember.
For dinner, Kyle took me to a cheap sushi place where he ordered the teriyaki chicken sushi because he didn't know he liked fish yet. I thought it was pretty adorable. Don't worry. Years + years after being with a west-coast woman Kyle now orders the spicy tuna roll. Next step: scallops.
April 1 was our anniversary for 8 years, and it was cute + funny + we'd get dressed up and go out for dinner even when we were long distance. Our cutest little Eva + Kyle moment? Celebrating our 1st anniversary while he was getting his Masters in Pennsylvania + I was at home in Kelowna saving money for travelling and we both went out and got a bottle of red wine + a plate of sushi [I assume Kyle was still eating chicken + faux-crab only] + Skyped while we ate it. Dawwwwwww.
saying goodbye to the dating anniversary
Once we got engaged we realized our magically hilarious April Fools Day anniversary was probably going to have to change. I know some people continue to celebrate a dating anniversary + their wedding anniversary, but we decided against it. I'm pretty sure the reason we made this decision was due to a Judge John Hodgman ruling. John Hodgman (you know the PC guy from the Mac vs. PC commercials from forever ago?) has a podcast where he hears annoyingly small cases, like complaints filed against ill-behaved Shetland ponies, or about whether you should give kids their balls back when they fly into your yard, or whether you could celebrate your dating and your wedding anniversary. He said you can't, so we decided not to. Here's a revisit of it, I can't find the original, but you can tune in + hear about it at 4:17.
Choosing a new anniversary
We took some time considering what our new, intentionally set, anniversary was going to be
CONSIDERING the season // our friends // our photographers // the weather
tis the season
Summer?
Or, in our little family, the sweaty-consideration season. As in, we knew Kyle would want to get married wearing a suit and he cannot wear one during the summer due to extreme sweating.
winter?
This is how it goes in my family. Late October my mom has a birthday. Then my dad has a birthday in November. Then Marie's birthday in Decemeber, then a week later is Christmas, then a week later is New Years, and less than a week later is my birthday.
Yeah see how you got bored reading that and didn't even realize my birthday was at the end of that massive list because you're already imagining being super partied out?
No way was I adding an anniversary to my already painfully partied-out Winter.
Fall?
The dream season! We had talked about getting married in September... But Kyle proposed in December which meant we had a measly 9 months, or nearly 2 years of being engaged, neither of which sounded good.
Spring?
Not sweaty, not overly partied out, and not an infinity v. rush job order?
Sold.
Everyone simply has to come.
This apparently isn't normal but we wanted our besties to come so badly we asked some of the busiest of them to help us pick the date. This is from the email we sent them:
"You are the kind of people we love the most- the kinds who are always off seeing the world, saving the world, changing the world, or taking on the world.
Unfortunately for us, this means that while you make our lives richer for being part of them, you also are rarely actually physically in them.
We are asking you to please put your mind to it and put together a list of the times between now and December 2016 (that’s for 2 years) when going to a wedding will hardly fit into your plans... We know you may have already booked or planned something major like a board exam, an articling position, a tough residency, a yoga retreat to India… and we would like to do our best to make sure you don’t have to choose between those events and our wedding."
Then we made a spreadsheet of all the times they could + couldn't make it. Sadly for us in that list of times that someone really couldn't make it was April 2, 2016, which would only change our anniversary by one day, as we had considered being the type of cute couple that keeps their dating + wedding anniversary the same.
I married a Meteorologist
Kyle did a 30 year analysis of historical data to predict which weekend(s) in April or May would statistically give us the best weather.
We wanted our photographers real bad + our venue was crazy flexible
Shari + Mike told us when they could be there and our venue had tons of availability (I think we were the first people to book a wedding there, although not the first to host one) so we added those dates to our spreadsheet.
We are nerds and spreadsheeted all the options + then decided with a piece of sentimentality
We put together all the values- non-sweaty + non-partied-out seasons // Best Friends + Photographer availability // statistically beautiful weather. We also added a few more variables: it had to be a Saturday, especially as over half of our guests came from out of town, we wanted to avoid the Sun Run in April [Canada's biggest start line! Dear lord, the traffic + the hotel bookings!] and we wanted to avoid long weekends as we didn't want to cramp anyone's holiday plans.
With all the values put in, we narrowed it down to about 2 Saturdays
+ then decided on the romantic moving of our anniversary from the 1st of the month to the last of the month.
Only 4 guests RSVP'd no [and they all had really, really good excuses], and our photos are all like award-winning, and the weather was Beyoncé levels of flawless.
Uh, so our intentional anniversary selection was perfect.
in your face anyone who was judging our nerdy overly analytical date selection.
how many anniversaries now?
One.
People ask me if we'll be celebrating our Iceland Legalversary, and we won't. I mean, I'm sure we'll have a beer together, but the big hey, this is our anniversary! is only once per year. When it came to choosing the date in Iceland we didn't really choose that date. I mean we told the government when Shari + Mike, Hello Tomorrow + we were going to be in Iceland, and then they found a time to slot us in.
But the reason we won't be celebrating it is that day was just to make it legal. Yes, it came at a really important time + I am so happy we did it + it was amazing + special + incredible + etc, but that wasn't when we got married. We got married in front of our friends + family, even if the government doesn't agree. We choose our anniversary. And we choose April 30, 2016.
And after all that work selecting that day?
the one anniversary we will be celebrating is april 30, 2016.
Although next year expect me to put a shout out on Instagram on April 1 marking
a decade of Kyle + Eva.
I have some solid, real-world advice if your friend is getting married.