In roughly a week’s time we’ll be celebrating our one-year anniversary as a couple. I thought I’ll publish a mega post on that day, but since there are no rules dictating how many posts I can write, perhaps I’ll write a series – time and space permitting.
Maybe some of you are wondering: why? Why do I bother to celebrate our anniversaries so religiously and why do I keep writing about my relationship? Well, I write about myself all the time so it is not surprising at all I am writing so much about something that defines so much of my current life. I am also obsessed about documenting my life, if you haven’t noticed. That is because I have belatedly realised how little I remember about my past. I remember the big upheavals but sometimes it is the mundane that defines our existence. I can only wish I documented more.
We have been celebrating our monthly anniversary religiously till now, and in the recent few weeks we have been celebrating the one-year anniversaries of all the significant moments that led up to us being together – the first time:
- we met
- we added each other on facebook
- she sent me a message
- she invited me to a group gathering
- we arranged to hang out 1:1
- we had dinner
- we hung out together for almost a full day
I have very fond memories of those moments and I am still in shock how it all happened. I was pretty damn sure I was going to be a nun. I think when love truly exists, it is worth celebrating everyday.
Previous relationships would start out intense and exhilarating, only to fizzle out around the three-month mark if lucky, and they will settle down into a mundane routine by the sixth. Today, I still feel like I am the luckiest person to wake up with her every morning, time has only served to deepen the relationship.
There are trials and tribulations of course, but each time we seem to have emerged stronger with a better understanding of each other. I didn’t think we would last, because we have such different personalities and I am so broken. That we are still together continues to surprise me.
Maybe knowing that it wouldn’t be easy right from the start gave us more determination to cherish harder, not knowing when fate would stop being kind to us. Maybe fate keeps on smiling on us because we try so damn hard to hold on to each other.
Is it a new paradigm? To not be in a relationship thinking it will work out, but to be in one knowing it may not work out but we will try to love our hardest in the mean time. I have grown old enough to know that sometimes love is not enough, that sometimes fate can deal you such terrible cards that it breaks even the strongest of us.
I love her with a tenderness that can only come with the determination of wanting to love a person for life tinged with the knowing that one day it could all end, be it by death or the ruthlessness of life. Whatever it is and however it goes, love is not measured of its duration, but by its aliveness.
And I wish to keep on celebrating its aliveness. If I’m lucky enough, I could celebrate it till death do us part.
How precious it is, to find the person I am able to write such words for.