The morning of my fourth wedding anniversary, I banged my knee on the stationary bike at the gym. It purpled and swelled, tender, like a plum.
Traditional gifts for a fourth anniversary are fruit and flowers. Things with short lives; things easily bruised.
My husband and I had been separated for a month at the time of our fourth anniversary. I had been at the gym to try to get in shape for the man I had fallen for long distance, the man I was going to join at a writing retreat soon. I had been subtly starving myself, veering into a midlife eating disorder, working hard to make myself disappear, although not the same way my mother had when she took her own life four years before; I wanted to pare myself down to the bone, flare into new life, become a creature unencumbered by grief.
Our first year of marriage was a dizzying blur. I gave birth to our son three months after our wedding; one week later, my mother killed herself in the midst of a psychotic break; less than four months after that, my mother-in-law died of a sudden heart attack. The traditional first anniversary gift is paper, and our marriage, so racked by loss, was paper-thin by then. It didn’t take much for it to tear.
I came back from the gym and was reading student work in my new rental house, ice on my banged up knee, when my husband swung by unexpectedly. Our 3-year-old son, who happily split time between our houses, was at preschool; my husband had taken part of the day off work to go on a coffee date with a woman he had met on an online dating site. He and the woman had talked at the coffee house for hours. He was all charged up, electric with it. They were going to get together again later that day.
I wasn’t sure how to react. On the day we got married, this was certainly not how I had expected to spend our fourth anniversary. I felt numb all the way through, as if the ice on my knee had affected my whole body, my brain, my heart. A spark of jealousy flashed somewhere inside my chest, but I tamped it down. I had no right to be jealous — I had put us in this situation; I had reached for someone else first. I told myself this could be a good opportunity to face my own jealousy, find ways to let it go.
Jealousy had tainted my first marriage — my first husband had an affair early in our relationship, and I spent our whole marriage braced for it to happen again, a state that wasn’t fair to either of us. I had made a vow to not fall prey to jealousy in this, my second, marriage.
As I mulled this over, my husband swooped in and kissed me. I was too shocked to return the kiss, too numb. He pulled away and said, “I just wanted to see if the magic was still there. I guess it’s not.” I was still stunned silent when he let himself out of the house.
Over the span of the next few months, my paramour broke my heart and the woman from the dating site wanted more from my husband than he was ready to give her. We each wallowed in our own misery for a while, but each slowly started to crawl out of it, started to work on ourselves more, started to grow stronger individually, more grounded, more at home in our own skin. (It helped that I had started to eat again, too, that I no longer wanted to disappear.) Eventually, tentatively, we started to feel more comfortable with each other again, too, even started to flirt a little.
On Halloween, after I had put our son to bed, my husband texted, “What will you give me if I come to your door?”
I texted back, heart pounding: “Everything.” He showed up half an hour later.
We were still cautious around one another after that passionate night, and decided to take things slow; we didn’t want to let our physical connection blind us to the deeper connection and trust we needed to re-establish. It wasn’t until around Christmastime that we were able to admit we had fallen back in love and wanted to do whatever we could to make our marriage work.
By the time our fifth anniversary rolled around the next summer, my husband and son and I were getting ready to move up to Lake Tahoe together. I had been invited to serve as visiting professor and writer in residence at a college up in the mountains, and it felt like the perfect place for a fresh start.
The traditional fifth anniversary gift is wood; something solid, utilitarian, something you can construct with. This fit; we were actively rebuilding our marriage, piecing it back together thoughtfully, slowly, crafting a structure we hoped could hold us both.
Historically, only the most impressive anniversaries were assigned specific gifts — as far back as the Middle Ages, 25 years of marriage was associated with silver, 50 years with gold. Then, in 1922, Emily Post suggested specific gifts to mark the first wedding anniversary, along with gifts for every multiple of five years up until the 25th; in 1937, the American National Retail Jeweler Association added gifts for the rest of the first 15 years, as well as for every five years between 25 and 50. “The order of gifts reflects the investment that the couple gives of themselves to each other,” write Gretchen Scoble and Ann Field in “The Meaning of Wedding Anniversaries.”
On our sixth anniversary, my husband and I went down to the beach at Lake Tahoe to renew our vows and exchange new rings, titanium with a strip of blue stone to represent the place of our new beginning, the lake we now call home.
The traditional sixth anniversary gift is iron; titanium is similar to iron, but slower to rust. A substance that, like our marriage now, is built to last.
Gayle Brandeis is the author of “The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide.”