For as long as I dig you...

Catherine and I have been dating now for 20 years. Because we don’t have the convenience of a wedding day to mark our anniversary, by tradition we use October 5. This is the date – you can read more about it here – when we first kissed, and that’s a pretty good place to start counting.

Over the years we’ve been together I’ve made up grander and more elaborate stories for Catherine’s initial characterization of our relationship back in the day.

I tried to convince her last week that her words were “we’ll stay together as long as I dig you.”

But, in truth, I’m pretty sure Catherine has never uttered the phrase “dig you” in any context. And that the essence of what she was communicating was “we’ll stay together as long as it’s the right thing for both of us.”

I liked her so much, I was down with whatever terms she wanted to describe us in. And, besides, although I didn’t have the “smashing the shackles of the patriarchy by not entering into a historically ownership-based state-sanctioned relationship” rhetoric to back it up, I had no great compulsion to get married anyway.

Moving across the country, buying a house, having a son, settling into the routines that, from the outside looking in (and often from the inside looking out) look awfully like the life of a young married couple: they’ve all added layers of complexity and commitment to that original model, but when you scrape that all away, I think we’re both solidly still in the “as long as it’s the right thing for both of us” camp.

Besides, I do still dig her, and I’m pretty sure she still digs me. What more could someone ask for?

(Photo of “20” by Bright Tal; Creative Commons licensed)