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, 3/4th 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 2nd
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.
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