Today is my first wedding anniversary. Unlike this day last year, which was a sunny and warm respite amid an extraordinarily rainy late summer and early fall, today is gray and decidedly fall-like in temperature, giving me pause to reflect on the differences between now and then, the months that described the interim, and the event of celebrating an anniversary.
In some ways, now and then look very similar. My husband and I have been bucking tradition for the last year, choosing to continue to live in our separate houses. There are pros and cons to this, and the choice has come with its attendant variety of reactions from people when it comes up in conversation. They range from the thinly-veiled judging of “Oh, you don’t live together?!? But you’re married.” to the quiet envy of “That’s a recipe for a good marriage.” to the completely supportive “Good for you! Don’t let society pressure you to do otherwise.” It’s always interesting to see what the response is going to be, and sometimes I don’t get the response I expect. The topic of marriage, it seems, like weddings, causes many people to offer up deep-seated opinions as to what it should and shouldn’t be.
For Ben and me, the decision to live separately was largely logistical. The house we will ultimately live in–the one Ben lives in right now–isn’t finished. The kitchen leaks, and the downstairs is a construction zone. I am unwilling to live there. My house, on the other hand, didn’t have space for Ben to have an office, which is important because he does consulting work when he’s not working on the house. When we got married a year ago, we held the (perhaps naïve) view that nothing would really change. While in a relationship, we’ve lived together, and we’ve lived apart, and we’ve been successful and unsuccessful at doing both, so the state of the relationship and the state of cohabitation seemed to have virtually no correlation. And not being ones for doing things simply because “you’re supposed to,” we chose to keep doing what we were doing.