Wishes For A Modern Marriage

I don’t wish you passion, fire, or other fading stars burning out in spectacular celestial shows. I don’t wish you a flawless marriage, because I don’t believe in reaching for impossibilities, nor do I believe that flawlessness means perfection.

I wish you happiness. In the simplest, purest form. Not all the time, not in bouts that hit you like lightning and leave you like waves receding from the shoreline, but total sum happiness. A constant warmth (not always the same temperature), embracing you like laying in a puddle of sunlight. A happiness that when the blackest depths of sorrow have you in their grips, allows you to still look up and see some little fleck of positivity in an otherwise dark world.

I wish you contentedness. That at the end of the day you’re happy to come home. To return to a person that makes every place feel like home, feel safe, feel welcoming. One of the eternal struggles of life is being filled with emotions far beyond your control. You can spend your entire life searching for something you don’t even know the name of and still come up feeling an internal emptiness. I wish that while you may spend the rest of your lives continuing to discover and search for new things, that you feel full and satisfied knowing you have each other.

I wish you knowledge and curiosity. I wish you knowledge of each other. To be able to say you know each other better than anyone else and mean it. I wish you the realization that knowing someone is not static and constantly changing. I wish you the curiosity to continue getting to know each other for the rest of your lives. For the drive to never give up on discovering the endless unknowns another person has to offer.

I wish you time. Time to be together. Time to be apart. Time to discover what it means to be a unit, but also your own person. Time to love each other and love yourselves. Time to grow old together, find new dimensions of yourselves, new stages of life, time to figure out what loving each other means when you are not young and spritely. I wish you the time to make decisions and never have them dictated to you by the cruel sense of humor of time.

I wish you a marriage free of technology. A marriage that you may choose to share bits and pieces of, but that is never controlled by the mammoth of social media and the internet. I wish you phone calls and not texts. I wish you private time and private places. I wish you no phone dinners, vacations free of cell phone service, and clear boundaries of when you will let others into your personal time.

I wish you youth. To be able to maintain the playfulness of being young and in love even when your bodies no longer move so jovially.  I wish you the ability to keep your inner child alive, without acting childish. To mature together without ever losing the outlook on the world of the youthful: that life is beautiful, winding, long, extraordinary, magnificent, and with the ones you love, even better.

I wish you kindness. To yourself, and to each other. I wish you selflessness. I wish you equality in dish doing, laundry, cooking. I wish you communication. I don’t wish you the ability to read minds or always be in sync, simply the ability to voice what you need. I wish you countless days not necessarily of adventuring, but being adventurous. Of trying new things, whether they be new to both of you or just one. I wish you infinite nights of cuddling on the couch watching Netflix

Most of all, I wish you heart palpitations. That even after every familiarity, every glance still feels like the first. That your heart beats just a little faster with the knowledge that this person, is yours.