The 16-Year Wedding Anniversary

My wife complains that I’m not particularly romantic.  Actually she’s never used those exact words, but she does like to remind me that I don’t send her flowers anymore (I used to do this much more often).  Of course I jumped on that immediately and downloaded the song ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers Anymore’ onto the iPod (the Barbara Streisand/Neil Diamond version . . . you’d be surprised how many versions of this song there are) but she was not amused.

At the end of the day she’s probably right, some of the romance that we used to have is gone.  It’s not that I love her any less, but I think it’s just part of life, and that is to say that “LIFE” seems to get in the way of your relationship.

It’s like the whole date night thing.  Before we had kids my wife and I wouldn’t even schedule anything, we’d just go out.  Drinks.  Dinner.  A movie. Sometimes drinks, dinner AND a movie.  Whatever.  Basically, we’d just go out and play the whole night by ear.  We didn’t care whether we got home at 9:00 PM or 2:30 AM.  If the plan was to see a movie, and yet for whatever reason we didn’t catch the movie, who cares, we’d just go see it the next day or the next weekend.  We seldom had a “date night agenda.”  Maybe we’d see a movie, and maybe we wouldn’t. Maybe we’d meet up with friends, and maybe we wouldn’t.  It didn’t matter because you knew you could do whatever it was that you missed out on the very next day.  Worst case scenario you’d do it the following weekend.

Of course date night, like a lot of things, changed as soon as we had kids.  And I’m not talking about the little baby stage where you were too damn tired to even go out in the
first place.  Where catching up on some much-needed sleep was your idea of a good Saturday night, or where you’d rush through dinner just to get back home because you weren’t sure the babysitter could handle the baby if he woke up and needed to eat (you know because feeding a baby is rocket science, and my wife and I were the only two people who could get this done . . . our first child ate anything and everything. . . he
literally would have eaten a spoonful of dirt had you fed it to him . . . and yet on more than one occasion I know my wife and I rushed back from some date night just to get home in time to feed him).

And I’m also not talking about the transition from using a “real babysitter” to using your 12-year old son who may or may not lock his little brother in a closet just for shits and giggles.  For at the end of the day kids themselves don’t ruin date nights, it’s all the stuff that the kids do that ruins date night.  Baseball and soccer games.  Ski trips.
Sleepovers.  Stomach flu.  Colds.  And so on.

My wife and I still go on date nights, we just don’t go on nearly as many as we used to, and more often than not we find that our date nights are cut short in some way, shape or form.  Rarely do we “do” both dinner and a movie.  And we almost NEVER do drinks, dinner and a movie.  Long date nights have definitely become a thing of the past.

So I decided I was going to put a little romance back into our relationship, and turn our 16-year wedding anniversary into one, big, long date night.  Nothing over-the-top special (I wasn’t going to whisk her away to Paris for the night), but something that
would rekindle our “glory” days before we were worried about making an 8:00 AM
soccer game in Elgin on Sunday morning.

First things first, I did a little research into the significance of celebrating your 16-year wedding anniversary.  What’s the traditional gift?  What type of flower do you give?  Is there anything extra special about this year?  I did a fair amount of Internet research, and realized that wedding anniversaries are a lot like birthdays . . . there are certain ones you get excited for, and celebrate, and there are other ones where you just basically pat yourself on the back and keep grinding away.  The 16-year wedding anniversary is sorta like turning 23 . . . no one cares.

According to multiple websites that are dedicated to wedding anniversaries the traditional gift for your 16-year anniversary is NOTHING.  The modern gift is silver hollowware (like I know what that is, though I did find some for sale on eBay), and the
traditional flower is . . . again nothing.

The next order of business was finding someone to take my kids for the night so that my wife and I did not have to rush back from whatever exciting activities that we were doing.  I was able to find friends willing to take the boys, though I did have to call in my mom at the last minute to stay with my oldest son who unfortunately developed a cold just days before our anniversary.  I think it goes without saying that kids can develop colds and flus in a matter of hours if they have a test the next day or if their mom and dad want to go out for the night.

After that I started looking for restaurants in the downtown area.  Though I’m not a big fan of traveling downtown (the big city scares me), I know it’s where she’d want to go, so the big city it was.  So I went to Yelp.com and started searching good restaurants.  The top five restaurants that came up were Alinea, Chicago Pizza Tours, Les Nomades, Next and Girl & The Goat.  So basically I had:

#1 – A restaurant whose name I can’t pronounce.

#2 – The CLEAR front runner, but probably not something that will earn me the kind of brownie points I’m looking for.

#3 – Another name which I can’t pronounce.

#4 – Next . . . . . right, Next.

#5 – And something that sounds an awful lot like a bad porn movie I saw awhile back.

Unfortunately this whole 16-year anniversary thing was proving to be more difficult than I had anticipated, and maybe 15 years ago I would have kept banging away until I got it absolutely perfect.  But the fact of the matter is life just gets in the way, and sometimes you don’t have enough time to get it all done, or get it all done the way you had hoped.  So I did what any “normal” person would do, and sent my wife the following email:

Babe,

I wanted to do something really special and fun for our 16-year wedding anniversary, but I’ve failed miserably.  I’ve been unable to set up a single thing, so I need you to put this together.  I’m open to pretty much anything, but just in case you, too, are struggling to come up with ideas, here’s what I DO NOT want to do for our anniversary:

• Sky Dive
• Bungee Jump
• Sing Karaoke
• Have Sex With a Man
• Have Sex With a Farm Animal
• Couples Massage
• Wine Tasting
• Ride a Roller Coaster
• Deer Hunt from a Tree Stand
• Watch Movies Pre 1985 (other than Jaws or Star Wars)
• Pedicure/Manicure
• Couples Paddle
• Shopping for Home Decorations
• Spend Time in a Car With Our Youngest Son and His Friends

Love, me.

P.S.  I’ve managed to invite my mom to spend the night at our house on our anniversary, so we may want to think about spending the night elsewhere.

My wife, of course, can plan events in her sleep, and it took her all of five minutes to make hotel, dinner and brunch reservations.  Champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries were waiting for us in the room.

I, of course, forgot the flowers.