Happy Anniversary to the Pod!
I love anniversaries. Honestly I love any excuse to celebrate and focus on the people I love just because I love them. Anniversaries, birthdays, Valentine’s Day… I’m a sucker for it all. I know lots of people kind of scoff at these celebrations but I say why not take every little moment of happiness we can? Why write something off as not having enough substance when the substance it has is all about joy and human connection? Plus – really – love is significant. A relationship is ample substance to celebrate, or at least it should be. We typically base our lives, social interactions and big decisions about where to live and what kind of life we want on the partner or partners we choose. If were gonna give the relationship that much influence on our lives, it better be an experience worth celebrating.
As a family we realized that there were a few good reasons to celebrate different anniversaries. Maggie and I truthfully began our relationship on August 8th but we didn’t make it really official, and it didn’t involve Ben or Tom, until September 5th. For a while I think we just envisioned September 5th as the anniversary because it was this day that we started finding words and defining both what we had and what we wanted.
It’s a darn cute story (in my humble opinion) so let me remind you. Feelings had been swirling between Maggie and I for… well a while. I mean we had first kissed in Nashville nine months before. But then being more than friends got harder to ignore when wine kindly removed the barriers of shyness and uncertainty that has kept us “friend zoned” for so many years. Fast foreword from August 8th to September 5th: Maggie and Ben found themselves flirting and both immediately sent messages to Tom and I kind of announcing that their messages turned flirty and making sure everyone was comfortable with it. This checking in and communicating about the situation opened the door for Tom and I to chat but I was on my way to run errands and go to work. It wasn’t the sexist situation for flirting. After work Ben and I ate a bucket of KFC while trying to figure out what the events of the day meant for us. We decided that it could mean polyamory. I don’t think we had that language exactly, but the concept that we could begin new relationships without changing our current one was there. So we headed to Maggie and Toms for a campfire and friendly chat about falling in love.
So September 5th became significant.
I think it was after Valentines day that it first occurred to us how inconvenient it would be to only celebrate September 5th. Think about it – what does Valentine’s Day look like with so many partners and overlapping relationships looks like?
Yeah we don’t really have an answer either.
Maggie and I realized that we had a few days that qualified as defining moments of our relationship. So we picked the one that made the most sense and had solidified our position beyond the friend zone – and our mutual agreement we liked being more than friends. This made August 8th our anniversary and meant that on September 5 we could focus on our boyfriends rather than overlapping celebrations.
I do want to acknowledge that something really important did happen for Maggie and I a year ago today. Aside from simply calling the whole pod “official”, we also took the opportunity to really acknowledge that we were dating and that we wanted to be dating. Until this point we existed in a grey zone. We were kind of just best friends that got drunk and hooked up. It was easy for everyone to feel we were just a side relationship to the marriages. Today, however, we made it clear that with me dating Tom and her dating Ben we were all experimenting with full and valid relationships outside our marriages and therefore there was space for Maggie and I’s relationship to be so much more than a side hook up habit between friends.
I’m so grateful for that.
All this to say that I love anniversaries. I love taking a moment in the year, that isn’t a holiday or some other event, when we celebrate loving each other.
I’ve been lucky enough to celebrate a string of anniversaries with Maggie and I celebrating August 8th, Ben and I celebrating our marriage on August 29th and now Tom and I celebrating our relationship on September 5th. What can I say, the end of summer brings the start of my favourite season and clearly is a very happy time in my life. A lot of stars align for me around this time.
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