How to Celebrate Your Anniversary
No matter how long you’ve been together, an anniversary is a special occasion that should be treasured and celebrated and is also a great opportunity to create new memories with your partner. Here are some tips on how to celebrate your anniversary and reasons why it’s so important.
Why Is It Important?
An anniversary gives you a chance to look back, not only over the last year but also every year of your relationship up to now to reflect on how far you’ve come and how you’ve grown as a couple. This allows you to celebrate the highs, and appreciate any challenges you’ve overcome together.
In our busy lives, it can be all too easy to neglect quality time with our loved ones, and our partners are no exception to this. We may live with them and see them every day but we don’t always have quality time, where we can have deep conversations, spend time enjoying each other’s company or try new things together. An anniversary is the perfect time to change this and set aside some dedicated time to show appreciation for each other. For example, you could enjoy a special meal at a romantic restaurant that typically offers a cozy atmosphere, like Temper Restaurant. Visit a meaningful location to reminisce about cherished memories, or plan an activity that you both love. There are countless ways to make your anniversary memorable.
Share an Experience
Is there an experience that you’ve both been dying to try but never quite got around to? Maybe you’ve both always wanted to go skydiving, drive a supercar or learn new skills from a master chocolatier. Another example is trying out Key West Snorkeling in Florida if you want to try some water adventures together. Your anniversary is the perfect time to take the plunge and try something totally new. Sharing new experiences and visiting new places as a couple isn’t just a fun way to celebrate your anniversary, it can also help bring you closer to your partner and strengthen your bond.
Gift Giving
It’s traditional for couples to exchange gifts on an anniversary, and traditional anniversary gifts were meant to show the length, and therefore worth, of a marriage. The early anniversaries are typically celebrated with more affordable but less robust materials, such as paper, which could be represented with a print to capture the moon on your wedding night. This is traditionally given as a first-anniversary gift. Then it moves onto cotton for two years of marriage. Later anniversaries are typically represented by more high-end materials; for example, the ‘golden’ anniversary (50 years of marriage) is often celebrated with the giving of gold gifts, such as gold Shamrock earrings or a gold watch.
These days, it’s more common for couples to give each other gifts outside of (or alongside) the suggested themes and it’s also increasingly common for unmarried couples to give gifts marking their relationship milestones as well.
When choosing an anniversary present for your partner, be sure to take their interests and personal tastes into consideration and try to think of something they’d never get for themselves, such as a pair of diamond earrings for a special anniversary.
Think Connection
Celebrating your anniversary doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive. The most crucial aspect of any anniversary celebration is to prioritise connecting and spending time with one another, even if, in the end, that’s ‘just’ an evening in, watching movies and sharing home-cooked food while reminiscing about the early days of your relationship. Whatever allows you to pause, reflect and appreciate the special person in your life, is the best way to celebrate your anniversary.
