50 Years of Love
This past weekend, I was fortunate enough to witness my eldest paternal uncle’s 50th wedding anniversary. Yes, you read that correctly, it was the 50th wedding anniversary. As far as I know, I have never met a couple that had their 50th wedding anniversary.
For those who are unfamiliar, the 50th wedding anniversary is considered the Golden Anniversary and is a milestone that is not accomplished by many couples. I would argue that couples that make it this far are part of an exclusive group. Do you know anyone in your family who has celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary? If so, consider yourself very lucky!
This celebration was also an incredible opportunity to meet virtually all of my cousins, uncles, and aunts from my father’s side of the family. My father’s immediate family members are all in the US now, but it is so difficult to meet all of them. When I was younger, it was much easier to meet since most of their kids were still in college and could easily make time to meet. Today, most of us are now almost done with college and are starting to enter married life and/or a professional life. This presents many logistical difficulties since it’s not easy requesting days off work.
To keep things simple, I am incredibly happy to have met all of my cousins again. Some of them I had not met in over eight years and yet they lived only ten hours from where I currently reside. For some people it may be too late to create new resolutions, but I want to make another resolution. I really want to work at keeping in touch with my family members via email, Facebook, etc.
All of us growing up and I feel fortunate to have seen my uncle celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary. What’s his secret? He doesn’t have one. His only advice to me was to treat marriage with respect and consider it another responsibility. So let’s hope I can join this exclusive club in about 50 or so years!