2nd Wedding Anniversary

As I type this, I’m sitting in my hotel room in Dubai, breathing through my mouth like a goldfish, because my nose is blocked and am probably overdosed with paracetamols and ibuprofens to fight my terrible headache/fever/cold, instead of exploring Dubai, but I cannot feel anymore blessed than I already feel.

We’ve been married for 2 years now.  I would like to say it feels like it was just yesterday that I got married, but it doesn’t. As much as it doesn’t feel like yesterday, but it sure was quick. Facebook has very readily reminded me of all the good times we’ve had together on our own holidays, with our families, all the well wishes and how thin I was on our wedding day.  What Facebook hasn’t shown me was all the fights we’ve had, all the struggles and the amount of takes we had to do to get that proper picture that made it to Facebook and Instagram wall.

I’m never been the kind of person who’s always wanted her birthdays/anniversaries, Valentine’s day and any other special occasion to be treated as a once in a lifetime thing that it needs to be celebrated from dawn till night, or wanting it to be all about me. Come to think of it. I’ve never really asked for anything to be all about me at any point of time in my life. But it’s nice to spend some quality time together on special occasions such as this.

For our first anniversary, Laxman decided that it was going to be all about me, so he wanted to get me an expensive watch for daily use and let me loose to shop till I dropped, while I insisted that we did something else together, like a helicopter ride for both of us.  It took us 2 whole weeks to decide on what we were going to do and he won. (I tried to get him flying lessons for his birthday last year, but it didn’t work either. I’m concluding that he’s probably afraid of heights) So we eventually went out shopping and dinner the weekend ahead of our anniversary. But on the day of our first anniversary, we spontaneously took half a day off from work so that we can do something nice together. We reached home and ended up fighting for something really petty, (I say really petty because I don’t even remember what it was for) because we disagreed about something. I think we ordered chinese take away and ate dinner in silence cos we hadn’t settled our argument yet.

During our second anniversary dinner last night, Laxman was stuck to his phone and being silent because he was hungry/tired after work, and I was glued to my camera trying to take pictures to remember the night and that I was actually in Dubai. The picture that Laxman uploaded on Facebook last night wasn’t the first shot that we took. I kept forcing him to take the pic, he said no. I was going to ask someone, he said no. Then I resorted to setting it up with a timer, and Laxman refused every single suggestion I had! It took 15 minutes of convincing, sulking and silent treatment from my end before he agreed.

We’ve had tonnes of ups and downs in our lives together as married couples in the last 2 years, which no one knows of or has heard of, not even our closest of friends and family. The one thing that Laxman always lives by is what Ephesians 4:26 says - And "don't sin by letting anger control you." Don't let the sun go down while you are still angry. So he always manages to cool down the situation within a day, sometimes it drags till the next morning if I fall asleep early that night.

We have plenty of differences, we don’t agree on the same things all the time, and we are not perfect human beings, but we are perfect for each other. As the days pass, I’m reminded even more that God Himself has divinely arranged this marriage. Regardless of any misunderstandings we have, there is no space for “I hate you” or “I don’t want this life” when God is in the center of the marriage.

Life is a bed of roses, don’t forget the one important thing that makes a rose stand out; it has thorns. Thorns prick, cause you to bleed, hurts you and takes time to heal while the flower itself looks gorgeously naive and smells nice. You have to accept both; the good and the bad. You can’t have the rose without the thorns and you can’t have the thorns without the roses.

In order to make me feel as if problems in married life is normal, my aunt once told me many years ago, that every household has its own share of problems. The younger me who never wanted to get married easily retorted to her and said “I don’t even want that household so I wont have the problems, problem solved”.

Many years down the line, here I am to say that problems in married life is normal. Fighting is normal, it’s definitely not encouraged, but it is normal. Ups and downs are normal. Behind every smile in my pictures, there would have been hundreds of frowns. Behind every selfies that Laxman and I take, there has been plenty of convincing and arguments that we don’t take pics together often enough. Behind every holiday we go on, there has been a lot of budgeting and planning that went into it. Just for the record, 3/4^th of my trips this year so far has been Laxman’s work trip, I just tagged along. This Dubai trip is no exception. We didn’t book a holiday in Dubai to spend a romantic 2 weeks for our 2^nd anniversary. Laxman’s working while I’m savoring the times of not having to do any cooking/housecleaning/work, and nursing myself back to normal health. That’s good enough of a wedding anniversary gift for me.

But despite all of this, I feel blessed to be married to you Laxman Sivanathan. Happy 2 years wedding anniversary.

PS: Never in a millions years have I ever thought I would think this way about marriage.