Today is my fifth anniversary!!  It’s kind of strange to think about sometimes because just as Hurricane Katrina was rolling through the U.S. and systematically destroying New Orleans, we were en route to the Hawaiian Islands to learn how to surf.  There is just such a wide spectrum of emotion related to this time of year for us; a brand new beginning to our lives and complete devastation to so many others.

While we don’t necessarily make a really big deal out of our anniversaries just yet, I think that as every year passes, we do begin to gain a certain degree of pride in the accomplishment that is marriage. I’ll admit, we’re getting better at being “us”. We understand each other better, we listen better, we compromise better, we work our way through the waves of spending a lifetime together a little bit better. In a world tainted with a divorce rate of nearly 50%, I think that as each year passes, we certainly acknowledge that every little bit counts!

When Steve and I were preparing for our wedding, we spent a lot of time with our priest preparing for the part that would come afterwards…the marriage. One of the final questions that he asked me in the last week before our wedding was “what scares you most about getting married?” My answer was “getting divorced”. While I had no doubt regarding our commitment to one another, I also knew that nothing is a guarantee. I suppose that is the risk that you take though and what also makes the commitment so sacred.

Over time, I have to come to discover a side of my marriage that has left me more confident than ever that my fears will never see the light of day; I’ve come to realize that while Steve and I are not necessarily very similar people, we do in fact, want very similar things in life. This shared vision for our life together really seems to make many elements of marriage much smoother. It appears that, as unromantic as it is…practicality just might be one of the keys to marriage.

It wasn’t until one of my favourite writers, Elizabeth Gilbert, sparked the most interesting thoughts regarding marriage in her novel, Eat Pray Love, that I finally began to let go of the preconceived notion that marriage had to be held together by love alone and that I began to give myself some credit for what appeared to be some insight regarding this adventure that I’ve been on for the past five years!

I clearly can’t cover it nearly as eloquently as Gilbert does but, in the latter part of her book, she discusses the fact that a hundred years ago, our fathers would have sat down with our potential husbands and asked all of the practical questions regarding our future life together; where will we live? How will we support ourselves? How many children will we have? Is he a cat person or a dog person? You know…all of the fundamentals that make spending a lifetime together a little less complicated.

Over the past century though, we’ve experienced the feminist movement and a variety of other factors that have given women an independence unlike any other time in history, and this includes choosing a spouse. This does sound wonderful and progressive, and in most ways it is but there is one thing that we, as women, have forgotten about; we are emotional creatures. We tend to react and feel our way through life based on the rush of hormones that we experience and the cyclical delusions that can often be created because of it! I’m not saying this is bad at all…I’m saying that a father stepping in to take the marital bull by the horns also wasn’t necessarily a bad thing either!

As women, we are smart, ambitious and successful but, most of us, when it comes to love, still hope for the fairytale ending and still yearn to be rescued by Prince Charming. Of course, I can only speak for myself but, regarding matters of the heart, my vision can be a little bit cloudy! Even with the best of intentions and with my greatest of desires to keep my head on straight, it never fails…when I fall in love, I have a tendency to fall hard and fall fast! Steve was certainly no exception!

As the amazing creatures that we are, our emotional tendencies have a habit of taking over our more logical and practical side on occasion. This, Gilbert claims, is where we need to be careful; while we may have replaced our fathers in the process of choosing our spouse, we haven’t progressed with the same zest when it came to replacing someone to ask all of the important questions. In turn, we have allowed our emotional selves to make this rather significant choice in our life only to find out years later, when the fog finally lifts, that we don’t have a whole lot in common with the person we are sharing our life with.

Is this the cause for our alarmingly high divorce rate? Possibly. Is this a valid issue to consider regardless? Absolutely! Believe me, I am by no means an expert in marriage by any stretch of the imagination. Heck…my twenty-one year old cousin has been dating her boyfriend longer than I’ve even known my husband! Semantics aside though, if there’s one thing that I’ve learned during my five years of marriage, it’s that all of those little shared desires in life, while they may not be the things that the perfect Valentine’s Days are made of, are necessary. The bottom line is this…if one of you wants to live in the mountains and the other wants to live in the city…someone is going to be unhappy, regardless of how much you love each other. Wanting the same thing matters.

So ladies, to make a long story short…Prince Charming is definitely out there to give all of us the fairytale ending that we’ve all been waiting for. But when he shows up on his white horse and sword a blazing…be sure to take a moment and ask him which hockey team he’ll be cheering for come playoff season!!!

And to my husband…my best friend…my beloved; thank you for the best five years of my life!  I couldn’t possibly imagine spending it with anyone else…

{us…in Calabogie…the site of our third date…back before my photography days!!}