Remembering Reality: What a Wedding Anniversary Is Actually For

As June marks the beginning of wedding (and, therefore, anniversary) season, a reader writes in to ask why wedding anniversaries are important. The question sounds simple, but something more searching lives inside it. Perhaps it arrives in a year when the anniversary passed without much ceremony, or in a season when the marriage feels more like a fact of life than a fire. Perhaps the reader is watching a spouse sleep on the other side of the bed and wondering whether the date on the calendar still means what it once did. That uncertainty deserves a real answer.

The easy reply would be that anniversaries are good for the relationship — that they give couples a moment to reconnect, to say the things daily life crowds out, to remember why they chose each other. All of that is true. But it is the surface of a deeper structure. An anniversary is important not primarily because of what it does for the couple's feelings, but because of what it is: the annual return to a day on which two people made a promise that changed the nature of reality.

The promise does not expire

C.S. Lewis noticed, with characteristic plainness, that lovers the world over spontaneously reach for the language of permanent vows. Love songs are full of promises of eternal constancy, he wrote, and the Christian law is not imposing on love something foreign to its nature — it is asking lovers to take seriously what their love already impels them to do.[^1] The vow spoken at the altar is not a legal formality that gets filed and forgotten. It is the verbal form of a self-gift that was meant, from the inside, to be permanent.

Hans Urs von Balthasar pressed this further. In the mutual self-giving of the spouses, he argued, each one learns that the two are not separate entities who happened to combine, but rather that they were, in a deep sense, always oriented toward one another — that 'one flesh' is not merely a metaphor for shared domesticity but a theological claim about what the union does to the persons inside it.[^2] When the anniversary comes around each year, it does not merely commemorate a past event. It is a reckoning with an ongoing reality: the two people standing in the kitchen on a Tuesday morning are not the same two people who would have existed had the vow never been spoken.

Memory as a moral act

There is a philosophical insight hiding in the practice of marking the date. To remember your anniversary is not a sentimental exercise; it is an act of moral attention. The date is a fixed point outside the fluctuations of feeling and circumstance, and returning to it each year is a way of locating yourself on a map whose coordinates do not shift with your mood.

Thomas Aquinas understood marriage as ordered to three interlocking ends: the good of the spouses, the generation and education of children, and — as he put it in the Summa Contra Gentiles — the perpetuation of the Church through faithful households.[^3] The third end is easy to underestimate. When two people choose to honor their anniversary seriously, they are not just doing something for their own marriage. They are, in a small but real way, bearing witness that covenantal love is possible, that it does not simply dissolve when the feeling ebbs. This witness has consequences for their children, for their friends, for anyone watching.

John Paul II, writing what became the Theology of the Body, framed this in terms of the 'nuptial meaning' of the body — the fact that our embodied existence is, by its structure, oriented toward self-gift.[^4] An anniversary is one of the times a couple consciously reclaims that orientation, naming it, choosing it again. The body has aged a year. The circumstances are different. And yet here is the same person, and here is the same gift, renewed. The annual return to that fact is not nostalgia. It is fidelity.

What the year does to a marriage

A marriage accumulates. Each year lays down strata: the months of ease, the arguments that never fully resolved, the illnesses, the children grown or lost, the silences that were comfortable and the silences that were not. An anniversary is the moment when you stand on top of all that accumulated sediment and look at it honestly.

Ferdinand Ulrich, writing on the philosophy of love and reception, described a good relationship as one in which the man receives his wife each day 'as if for the first time' — not in the artificial sense of pretending ignorance, but in the deeper sense of genuine presence, of attending to the person rather than the mental model of the person.[^5] The anniversary creates a formal occasion for this. It is an annual invitation to look at the spouse you actually have, not the composite image built from years of habit and assumption, and to ask whether you are still genuinely turned toward them.

This is why the anniversary can feel uncomfortable in difficult years. It holds a mirror up. The date does not care whether the year was good or bad, whether affection is high or low. It simply arrives and asks: are you still here? Are you still choosing this? That question is not an accusation. It is an opportunity.

The sacrament keeps working

Royo Marín, in his theology of the Christian life, described marriage as the sacrament proper to the lay state — the primary channel through which most people encounter the grace of their vocation.[^6] The grace of the sacrament was not a deposit made on the wedding day and then spent down over time. It is ongoing, available, renewed each time the spouses choose the covenant again.

This means the anniversary is not looking backward at something that happened. It is drawing on something that is still active. The Church's blessing on the marriage did not expire with the calendar year. It persists in the structure of the union, and every conscious return to that union — including the annual marking of its beginning — is a way of opening the hand to receive what is already being offered.

For couples in hard seasons, this reframing can be genuinely useful. The anniversary need not be a performance of happiness. It does not require that you feel what you felt at the altar. What it requires is presence and honesty: here is where we started, here is where we are, and we are still choosing this. Lewis, again, was direct on the point — a promise is about actions, not feelings, and the use of keeping two people together in seasons when feeling has cooled is not primarily social utility but the discovery, over time, of something better than the initial state.[^7]

A date worth keeping

So when the anniversary comes this year, do not let it pass as a logistics problem to be solved with a dinner reservation. Sit with the date itself for a moment. The day means that two people, on a specific morning, made a specific promise in the presence of God and witnesses, and that promise has been quietly shaping both of them ever since. The person across from you is not who they would have been without you. You are not who you would have been without them. That is not a small thing.

Mark the day not because you have to, and not only because it is good for the relationship, but because the truth deserves to be acknowledged. Fidelity, named out loud each year, has a way of becoming more real.

P.S. You might consider pulling out the old albums and videos, or even reciting the vows you spoke year(s) ago.

[^1]: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity [^2]: Von Balthasar, The Christian State of Life [^3]: Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Ch. LXXVIII [^4]: John Paul II, Theology of the Body [^5]: Ferdinand Ulrich, Homo Abyssus [^6]: Royo Marín, Teología de la perfección cristiana [^7]: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity