Without the net
Obstacle or guide? Robert Frost has some thoughts… Image Wikimedia
My wife and I recently celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary. That’s not long enough that people automatically ask us for advice or reflections, but we’re at least closing in on the median duration of a US marriage. High five.
If pressed, I’d say that I got here after a string of good decisions, starting with the woman I married. And that would be true but not really helpful. In the general sense it’s just a tautology—marrying the right person consists of marrying the right person—and in the particular sense it won’t help you out much either—I certainly hope that my wife’s not available again while I’m alive, and anyway she wouldn’t be a good match for you.*
But I think I can do slightly better than that, and pass along one piece of abstract advice and one piece of extremely specific advice.
The abstract: give what your partner wants, instead of just giving what you would want. This took me an embarrassingly long time to learn but it’s something like the lowest common denominator of all other marriage advice. It contains listening, empathy, communication, all that good stuff.
That one is, admittedly, tough to put into practice. But I also have specific advice that you can learn and act on right now: give anniversary gifts according to the themes for each year. There are many lists online and they mostly overlap.
The themes seem restrictive at first. But they’re helpful. If you just can do anything romantic, it’s analogous to Frost’s famous quote about playing tennis without the net.** If you have infinite degrees of freedom, it’s not only harder to focus your creativity, but you can fall into the rut of just doing the same thing every year (or not remembering what you did many years ago and presenting a duplicate gift to a partner who absolutely will remember). Here’s what that can look like in practice:
Paper (1). This is a well-known one and a good warmup. For example, you can get custom stationery (if you’re boring) or cocktail napkins (if you’re a bit more fun)
Fruit or flowers (4). If you don’t actually want to give flowers—the correct framing for this choice being that you prefer to give flowers on more frequent occasions—then print a gift certificate for an item or event and fold it into an origami flower.
Wood (5). If your name happens to mean “of the yew tree” like mine does, you can make a yew board into a ring box and give her the companion piece to her original wedding band and engagement ring.
Copper (7) If you have inspiration, months of lead time and international contacts you can source pennies from the places we lived in the past and make a mosaic with a year-and-country appropriate penny for important events for each year since we met. This one was a huge pain and she definitely won the informal gift competition this year.
For aluminum (10) you realize that planes are made of aluminum and take a nice trip together.
Ivory (14) you lean out from the ivory trade and commission a custom piano song with lyrics full of references to our history together.
Porcelain (18) you realize that porcelain is just fancy clay, and there are different kinds of clay, and you commission a custom modeling clay bobblehead figurine of the two of us based on a favorite photo from a recent formal event. This is on my desk right now.
That advice may have gotten impractically specific, but hopefully it’ll help at least one person out there to realize that structure isn’t a barrier to creativity; it’s something like the trellis upon which creativity can grow.
* Sorry if that sounds cocky but it’s a statistical certainty.
**Writing poetry without rhyme is like playing tennis with the net down. - Robert Frost (apparently, more or lessr.com/2021/05/24/poem-tennis/). This always struck me as being an interesting twist on the other “without a net” aphorism, about being like a trapeze artist without the net. Frost (and I) mean that the restriction shapes your approach to the task in ways that spark creativity. The trapeze thing is a bit more harrowing than I have in mind for this topic.