The road so far…

It has been a pretty miserable week here, weather wise. The constant rain, storms and swarms of mosquitos have kept me away from fishing, hiking, or basically anything that involves going outside.

Pictured: My back yard

Now this would normally make for a rather boring week, however today my wife and I celebrate our 4th wedding anniversary. It’s not a lot of years, but compared to the frankly alarming divorce rates in North America and especially among shift workers like myself, I think we are doing quite well. Including 4 years of marriage, we have actually been together for 10 years now.

Its been a wild ride

10 years is a long time to stick with anything, be it a job, a friendship, a hobby, or a game account (I love you Steam don’t ever leave me!). My marriage, however, still feels fresh, as though it’s brand new and we still have no idea what the hell we are doing or what’s coming down the road. At the same time, I can look back at the last decade and be fairly proud of how well we’ve handled things so far. We got this, nothing can stop us now.

Go us!

It’s like being on a long and scenic hiking expedition, and we are perpetually at the halfway point. An interesting mix of excitement and adventure ahead with the comfortable confidence of many miles and challenges already put safely behind.

10 down… many more to go

Like a journey of any sort, it takes the right partner to make the experience tolerable, nevermind enjoyable, and in that respect i’ve been incredibly lucky. There are a lot of fairly negative stereotypes about marriage that I am happy to say that I think we avoid. There are also a lot of overly romanticized notions and widely used tropes of what a healthy and happy marriage should look like, and I don’t mind saying we avoid those just as well.

Great view, nice background too

For example, it seems like every single person who is married has married their ‘best friend’. While i’m sure it may apply to some people, I’ve always found this a strange concept. My best friend is not my wife. My best friend is a guy named Les. A best friend is still just a friend. You are not sharing all your bills and finances, you are not sharing every inch of living space with them, and you don’t have to plan your vacation time, appointments, or work schedule around them unless you want to. You can call your best friend a dumb twat and not talk to them for a month without turning your (or their) life completely upside down, then grab a beer a month after that like nothing even happened. I may have known my wife for 10 years, but I’ve known my best friend since girls had cooties (I am now 95% sure that they do not).

Best friends, not married

No, my wife is not my friend, she is something completely different, and so much more. She is my partner, and I hers. Our lives are intertwined with each other in a way that they simply cannot be with anyone else. This partnership takes work – it can be frustrating, can require extra work from one of the other at various times, can most definitely complicate what might otherwise be small things, and can otherwise be an overall pain in the ass.

Especially when she makes me run

More often though, in our case, this partnership is rewarding, enriching, and makes it very simple to be happy. We support each other when needed, we share some of the same hobbies and interests, tolerate others together, and keep our own seperate ones which the other respects and supports. We enjoy days together as well as days on our own. It works for us, and it works well.

Luckily, outdoors is a shared interest

I am not an emotional person by any stretch, and am not much of a romantic, as my wife will attest to with disappointment. I won’t sit here and gush about how my love knows no bounds or that I suffer every minute that I’m apart from her or any of that sort of exaggerated crap. I think that the truth is far more elegant in it’s simplicity. She needs me, and I need her. I take comfort in the knowledge that no matter how long i’m away camping or hunting or working, that I will come home and she will be there. I miss being home when i’m away, but its not home that I miss.

Home is wherever the crazy is

It is a special connection that you have with someone when you can’t rightly remember not having them in your life, nor picture quite exactly what your life would look like in a future that didn’t include them. This is a connection we have, a connection that we will continue to build on and work at, and one that I can’t even begin to picture not having. I wouldn’t give it up for the world.

Also, getting looks like this one

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