Anniversaries: [WARNING] A Love Letter

SB and I celebrate our second anniversary today.  On the 20th, we celebrate our first year "on the road."

It's appropriate these milestones are so close to each other.  Our marriage gave me the road, and the road teaches me valuable lessons about marriage.

Those lessons include the value of personal space and time, how to take care of one another, and the benefits of a Lazy Susan among others.

Lazy Susan - The Original Turntable

The best lesson I'm learning:  the more people involved in our lives, the more vibrant our life together.

As the world seasons us,  we encounter diverse individuals and new situations that expose elements of her character I never knew before.  The more I learn, the more I love.

I started learning this lesson at our wedding, ironically, watching her interact with our family and different friend groups.  She was rowdy with the partiers, gracious with humble, firm with confrontational, and happy to be with everyone.

On the road, I'm constantly reminded of "our special day" [blah].  I learn something new when she interacts with different cultures, people who don't understand her, eager cooks that want to know how she likes meals she secretly despises, and any number of other situations in which the road drops us.

The friends and company she keeps say a lot about her character, too.  True, most of the people we meet on the road are co-workers, but most of them are free-thinking, smart, passionate individuals.  They are like SB, and SB is like them.  It makes tagging along with them much easier because we're like minded.

What I love most about this lesson, however, is how SB has her own experiences that mold and change her.  For example, in Zhangpu, she would see more of the region on her drive to work and interact with more locals at the refinery than I did sitting in the hotel room.  She'd come home and tell me all these new stories.  In some ways, it made her time in Zhangpu richer.

Such unique experiences with others make her more interesting and dynamic.  She grows and changes, which intrigues me and keeps me engaged in the relationship.

Road life may have extended our honeymoon phase beyond the customary one year, but to ignore any insights in that time would do more harm than learning nothing.  I don't think I'd learn these lessons had we transitioned into the normal, post-wedding life of careers, home, and kids.  I certainly wouldn't have learned them as quickly, given that I thought I was done making friends after college.  The biggest surprise in the last year has been the number of friends we've made and how much more that makes me appreciate my life with my wife, SB.

Thanks, love.