We are not married, so which date counts as our anniversary?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nWhichever one you both recognise. Unmarried couples usually end up choosing between the first date, the day you agreed you were together and the day you moved in, and any of the three works as long as it is the same one every year. The practical test is not sentiment but memory: pick the date you are both certain of, because an anniversary that has to be looked up stops being marked within about three years. If the two of you genuinely remember different days, take the earlier one and stop negotiating. And you owe nobody an explanation for it \u2014 a date you chose yourselves is no less real than one arranged around a registry office’s diary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shop-bought cards already have a verse printed inside. Where do your own words go?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nUnderneath the printed verse, and keep them shorter than you think. The printed lines are doing the formal work \u2014 the greeting, the sentiment nobody needs to invent \u2014 so your part is the specific bit the manufacturer could not know: a reference to the year you have had, one thing you are thanking them for, and your name. Three or four lines is plenty. A full page competing with a printed rhyme reads as though you did not trust it. If you have more to say than that, buy a blank card and write the lot. What does not work is adding a second general sentiment of your own, because you then have the same thought twice on one page in two different voices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It falls on an ordinary working weekday and we are both shattered. Is it poor form to move the celebration?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nNo, provided the date itself is acknowledged on the day. Move the meal, the evening out or the present to the weekend as much as you like, but say something on the actual date, even if it is only a message in the morning and a card left on the side. What partners tend to mind is not the absence of a celebration, it is the day passing unmarked. Splitting it also takes the pressure off a Tuesday nobody has the energy for: a rushed dinner where both of you keep checking the time is worse than a proper one three days later. Agree it in advance, though. A moved celebration is fine; a silently forgotten one is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ten years in, how do you write something that is not simply a list of everything that has happened?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nPick one thing and go into it rather than covering the decade. A summary of ten years is always a list of moves, jobs and holidays, and it reads like a round-robin letter because that is what it is. What works is a single detail with weight behind it: how they were during one bad month, a habit of theirs you have come to rely on, something they say that you would miss. The years do the rest of the work by implication, since the reader already knows how long it has been and you do not have to prove it. If you want a number in there at all, put it in the first line and then leave it alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My partner would rather nothing about us went online. What do you do when everyone else marks the day publicly?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nTreat it as a preference rather than a slight, and write to them instead of about them. A card, a letter or a long message covers everything a post would and reaches the only person it was meant for. If family will notice the absence, replying to somebody else’s message is usually enough to settle it. The mistake is posting anyway and apologising afterwards, or posting something deliberately vague as a compromise \u2014 both read as ignoring what was asked. It is also worth checking whether the objection is to all of it or only to the sentimental kind, because plenty of people mind the wording far more than the picture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An anniversary is the one date in the year that belongs to two people and nobody else, which is exactly what makes it awkward to write for. There is no audience to pitch the tone at, no running order, and the phrase that arrives first is usually the least useful thing you could say. What […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":598,"featured_media":3680,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3125],"tags":[],"moimportance":[],"motype":[],"moformat":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3679","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-greetings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leedsname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leedsname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leedsname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedsname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/598"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedsname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3679"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/leedsname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3683,"href":"https:\/\/leedsname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3679\/revisions\/3683"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedsname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leedsname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedsname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedsname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3679"},{"taxonomy":"moimportance","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedsname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moimportance?post=3679"},{"taxonomy":"motype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedsname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/motype?post=3679"},{"taxonomy":"moformat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leedsname.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moformat?post=3679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}