Today is my 19th anniversary! Hooray! To celebrate, let’s play a quick round of trivia.
What do you call your 25th wedding anniversary?
The correct answer is your “silver anniversary!” (“Silver jubilee” would also be an acceptable answer.) Everybody guessed that one, right? It’s pretty simple. Okay, how about an even easier one?
What do you call your 50th wedding anniversary?
Your “golden anniversary.” Everybody knew that, too, right? All right, let’s try a harder question.
What do you call your 20th wedding anniversary?
Uhh, believe it or not, it’s supposedly called a “China anniversary.” Strange, huh?
Okay, now, for the final round—and this one is really going to stretch the boundaries of your knowledge—here we go:
What do you call your 19th wedding anniversary?
The answer is: nothing. Not a thing.
Last week, as I was preparing to celebrate our big day coming up on October 1st, I was surprised to discover that my being married to, caring for, and living with the same woman for nineteen years means absolutely nothing… and it isn’t even worth celebrating.
Okay, of course, I don’t literally mean that it means nothing and that it’s not worth celebrating.
But I am saying that, according to folklore on the internet, when I did extensive searching online last week to find out what magical milestone my 19th anniversary would have, I came up totally blank.
In fact, believe it or not, those special kinds of dates stopped being counted at the 15-year mark—four years ago.
That’s right: today, this special day after nineteen years of marriage, has no traditional name, theme, or gift.
You may be shocked (as I was) to find out that during our first decade of marriage, without even knowing it, my wife and I breezed right past a bizarre list of special anniversaries we didn’t even know about: paper, cotton, leather, fruit, wood, sugar, copper, bronze, willow, and tin.
Yep, those are, in order, the special anniversaries of your first ten years together. After those, we also weren’t aware that we passed our steel, silk, lace, ivory, and crystal anniversaries.
Somehow, in the midst of our first decade and a half of living and loving, flirting, and fighting, we passed our fifteen-year mark right when… our culture stopped caring.
Apparently, society has deemed the first fifteen years of marriage worthy of being called out separately and giving each year, individually, its own name, with specific gifts already pre-planned to make it that much easier for everybody to bless you with. But then, I guess, they get just bored and give up altogether.
As far as I can recall, nobody has ever given my wife and me a gift of paper (that’s kind of cheap), leather (that’s creepy), sugar (that’s weird), or willow (what?) for an anniversary gift, and I’m okay with admitting that this doesn’t bother me at all.
But how strange it is that just when we were getting to the really hard part of living together, deep in the trenches of parenting, when our lives were peaking in their level of unimaginable difficulty, right at the moment our marriage became old enough to get its driver’s license, people stop counting and it isn’t special anymore.
That’s weird.
Surely, I thought, there must be some kind of nickname or gift or theme for a 19th anniversary. Why wouldn’t there be?
But no, after searching high and low, it’s a big fat zero.
I felt like I was at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, asking for something I apparently don’t deserve, and now Mr. Wonka is shouting at me.
“You get nothing! You lose! Good day, sir!”
Wondering how this could be, I went to Grok, my favorite AI tool, and asked for a suggestion in the absence of an “official” version. Do you know what Grok suggested?
Tinfoil.
Huh? This is my tinfoil anniversary?
Grok’s response:
“For the 19th anniversary, which doesn't have a widely recognized traditional or modern gift, let's invent something that captures the awkwardness and in-between-ness of being one year shy of two decades: a custom-made sculpture or art piece crafted from tinfoil.
Why tinfoil? It's cheap, shiny, and somewhat awkward to work with, much like being 19 – you're not quite there yet, but you're trying to shine.”
That’s weird.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized how weird this whole thing really is.
Not just suggesting foil as the element that best personifies nearly two decades of togetherness, but how the very essence of celebrating nearly two decades of togetherness is in and of itself kind of strange.
For starters, 19 is such a weird number to begin with.
In a way, I think it’s impressive to be able to say that I’ve been married for 19 years. When I was able to say, “I’ve been married for a decade,” that seemed like forever. And 19 years is almost double that. But, as Grok mentions, it’s not quite double.
19 as a number is more notable for what it’s not than for what it is. It’s like the Apollo 13 mission getting almost all the way to the moon, but not quite. What happened with Apollo 12 and 14? You probably can’t even remember, but you’ll never forget Apollo 13.
Or, perhaps it’s like the Apostle Paul describing to the Corinthians how he had received “forty lashes minus one” five times in the first century. Turns out, the ancients decided that forty lashes of the whip were enough to kill a man, so if they only wanted to punish (or torture) him, they figured: “Let’s get as close as we possibly can to killing him, but stop one lash short so he doesn’t actually die.”
Okay, I’m being overly dramatic. But still…
My wife and I both agree that the 19th anniversary is a strange one. The number is so awkward: when we hit eighteen years, that seemed like passing a huge milestone. It’s like your 18th birthday when you “become an adult.” Everybody claps and cheers for that. Later, turning twenty seems like a big deal because it’s a full two decades.
But 19? That just feels and sounds funny, plus it’s an odd number and a prime number.
Our anniversary this year also feels funny because we live in Arizona. On our wedding day, in Colorado, the weather was quite pleasant, and there was an autumnal chill in the air.
In fact, when we returned from our honeymoon one week later, there was snow on the ground. I had to scrape ice off our car’s windshield in the airport parking lot, and since I didn’t have a scraper, I had to use a credit card.
But that was in the Rocky Mountains. Here, in the Sonoran Desert, even as I write this, it’s still hovering in the triple digits. Just this past weekend, I was sweating buckets when it reached 105ºF on Saturday.
…and that was a full week after the official start of autumn.
That’s weird.
Fun fact: nineteen is the age my wife was when we were married nineteen years ago. She was almost twenty, but not quite (just like our marriage now). Barely older than her myself, I was twenty on our wedding day.
At some point earlier this year, we did the math and realized that we’ve finally surpassed the calendar date where we now have known each other longer than we have not known each other.
We still have yet to pass the mark of living more days as married people than as single people, but that is coming very soon.
So, now I’ve known Rachel longer than I have not known her, and the same goes in reverse.
That’s weird.
Perhaps the strangest thing of all of this is thinking about how next year is going to be the most monumental year of our lives thus far.
Lord willing, if we all survive until then and if my wife and I can keep the flame of passion burning, in 2025, we will celebrate:
Our 20th anniversary
My 40th birthday
Her 40th birthday
Our two oldest children graduating from high school
Our youngest child turning 13
That’s a lot of milestones. It also means all five of our kids will be teenagers, and we’re inching ever closer to being empty-nesters at the spry age of 48.
That’s weird.
The icing on this cake of weirdness—and what seemed to be a very bad omen—came on Friday night: I lost my wedding ring. That’s never happened to me before.
For nineteen years, as far as I can recall, I’ve worn my wedding ring every single day. Oh, sure, there’s been a time or two when I forgot about it after taking a shower and left the house without it… but later, I’d put it back on when I returned home. So, I don’t recall ever really “losing” it.
I’m super obsessive about that, and there’s a reason why.
Right after we were married, maybe in the first month or two, I was fidgeting with my new ring at the office where I worked. It was so new it still felt awkward on my skin, and I constantly fiddled with it, wiggling it up and down my finger.
My dad (who worked with me) gave me a mild scolding: “You should never take your ring off.”
“Oh, it’s no big deal. I do it all the time,” I replied. He had some thoughts about that.
“Well, you’re just doing that now because you’re young. Wait until you’re older, and you’ll eventually leave it on forever. I never take mine off. Ever. I sleep with it on, swim with it on, shower with it on… it never leaves my finger. It will be the same for you, you’ll see. You’ll get used to it, and you’ll never take it off again.”
This made me upset because he was making fun of me for being young and inexperienced (which is not my fault, and I hate it when older adults are condescending like that). But I was also annoyed because he was telling me that I would change my habits to be more like him in the future and that this was inevitable.
Well, guess what? I take my ring off all the time. I take it off every single night. I set it on the nightstand next to our bed before falling asleep. I literally can’t sleep with it on. It bothers me too much. When I wake up, I put it back on.
I always have. I still do. I never stopped.
Unlike my dad, I take my ring off when I go to the gym, when I swim, and when I shower. I’m constantly taking it off and putting it back on multiple times a day, and that’s never been a problem.
And I was doing fine until I reached the nineteen-year mark, when, for the first time ever, I finally lost track of it. That’s right: just a few days before my anniversary, I actually lost my wedding ring.
How did that happen? …and what were the odds?
I was going to take my wife to the jewelry store and buy her a new piece of jewelry to celebrate our anniversary, so the timing was bizarre.
And now I felt embarrassed that I might have to buy two items at the jewelry store: a gift for her—that we’d planned on—and now a replacement wedding ring for me!
Well, praise God—it didn’t get that bad. We found my ring right before that happened, which was good because I’d had an awful gnawing feeling in my stomach like I’d have to finally admit that my dad was right and that I had lost it forever.
About three hours before we were going to go to the jewelry store, my wife sat down on the couch and set down a drink on the side table, and we heard a metallic boing-oing-oing-oing-oing sound as it rattled off the table and bounced onto the floor.
There it was, just in time.
That’s weird.
Last week, I had apparently taken it off while watching a movie (like I often do), then just forgot to put it back on. I had checked that stupid side table multiple times before, but didn’t see it for some reason.
I grabbed the ring and put it back on. I had been without it for about three days. It felt good to put it back on my finger. It felt right.
After all that, nearly spending an anniversary ringless, I started thinking about what that little ring meant. This silly little piece of jewelry and I actually have quite a history.
It’s nothing but a cheap, silvery band of metal, but it’s been on my finger for as long as I’ve been married to my wife. It seems obvious to say (or write) that, but to think about it in this way is strange: it’s a solid piece of tangible property that marks the day I was married.
Like my marriage, my wedding ring is now nineteen years old. It’s older than ALL five of my kids.
That’s weird.
So, long story short, today I celebrate a strange day: a momentous occasion marked by an odd, prime number with no special marker or theme to commemorate it.
I hope everything turns out okay in 2025 when we hit the big 4-0 for our birthdays and the big 2-0 for our wedding. Next year, there may indeed be a big celebration where we can go all out and invite all our friends.
Maybe we can even buy real party hats and go completely over the top. But this year, there will be no party hats, tinfoil or otherwise.
And we don’t actually “get nothing” — we didn’t get everlasting gobstoppers, but we did get some wings. We celebrated by going to Buffalo Wild Wings and getting boneless wings.
So actually, if I think about it, over the course of the weekend, I bought her a new ring, and then we went out for wings…
I guess that means our 19th anniversary is our “Wings and Rings” anniversary.
That’s weird.
Willy Wonka, Tinfoil Hats, and a Lost Wedding Ring