Looking up the aisle, I swallowed and blinked to hold back tears. There stood my husband-to-be, my best friend, the person I had spent the last five years of my young life loving. He seemed to be shaking just a little in his tux, his hazel eyes looking back at me.
Walking down the hallway in work today, I hummed Billy Joel’s “You’re My Home” to myself. “Wherever we’re together, that’s my home.” I thought of my husband’s smile and smiled back to myself.
On the day you get married, people say you have your whole life ahead of you. What they don’t tell you is that life is made up of a series of years, months and days, each with their own rhythm. Even though ten years sounds like a long time on your wedding day, it doesn’t feel that way when it rolls around.
Instead, it feels like a collection of the ordinary and extraordinary, the good and the bad, the hard and the easy, with both of you together at the center. At least that’s how it felt to me, when my husband, Chris, and I celebrated our tenth anniversary.
In that decade, Chris and I learned a lot about each other and marriage. We’ve been through hospital stays, international travel, crummy work hours, living in multiple places, graduate school, and having two kids.
Here are a few things we’ve picked up along the way: