This was me last year:

This was the moment that we were announced as husband and wife and ushered back into a room full of our cheering family and friends.

Oh man, we danced the night away, hugged everyone, ate cupcakes…we celebrated.  It was just perfect. The next morning we even had breakfast at a little diner across town with twenty of our closest friends before we had to say our final goodbyes to everybody. There were moments immediately following the wedding where Napkin and I definitely had the post-wedding-blues. Even with our Japan honeymoon looming… it was hard to think that all of that excitement was over and that our friends had gone home and back to their normal lives. (Do any of my married friends feel me on this?)  But there was also that slow moving spread of real, content happiness that was starting to find us because Napkin and I knew we were finally a WE.

You hear about the “first year of marriage being the hardest” often… and I think I know why now. It’s not that it’s hard (meaning bad) it’s that you have to overcome the hurdle of co-existing to being together. Does that make sense? Like, where to meet in the middle when I want Chinese food and Napkin wants pizza. Or, buying a home together. Or, realizing that your life is now shared in its entirety. For me, that wasn’t easy. It was a really difficult, bumpy transition. In fact, only now do I think that Napkin and I are starting to find our flow.

It’s been a crazy year for us. We’ve knocked a lot of life goals out in one fell swoop…. which was why I thought it was more than appropriate for us to just take a couple days, sit back and relax together. Not just in the same space– but together. So together, in fact, that when Napkin took a (tiny, thirty minute) nap without me on our anniversary I pouted over it. (#brat.jpg)

But really! We just needed to spend time being around each other without looming home renovation projects and deadlines, etc. And really, y’all. That’s all we did. We LOAFED.

On our wedding day, it positively POURED. I mean, the sky opened up and it rained so hard you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. I was constantly being reassured that, in Hindu, rain on your wedding day was a sign of luck. Feng Shui says it’s a sign of cleansing and fertility. I barely remember the rain at all. I just remember my husband’s face. But! The Weather Gods blessed us with some pretty nasty storms on the day of our anniversary as well so I took it as permission from the Universe to do absolutely nothing.

So that’s what we did. We ate breakfast in bed. We watched little snippets of TV shows and movies. We dragged ourselves up and out for (AMAZING) Indian food at a restaurant we had never heard of.

…and then we came home and just let ourselves feel content.

It was exactly what we needed. A gentle reminder to let ourselves look back at the year together and realize how far we’ve come. It was, in a way that was completely different from our wedding day, perfect.

I can’t wait to look back on year number two.

❤