Yesterday, I uploaded a picture of my anniversary dinner to Blipfoto. It was lovely, and looking back, I often have recorded the date on one of my sites. I think a post at twelve years might have been the first time it’s mentioned here.
But when do you start counting? PY and I go right back to the beginning, because when we met, there was no possibility of marriage. We still get lovely anniversary cards celebrating a different date (albeit yesterday) because that’s when we had a partnership.
The option of marriage came many years later, and by then, we were already counting, so we weren’t going to go backwards. But given the amount of time people live together before marriage these days, even those who have always been able to have a ceremony, I wondered if there was any data on the trend. So I had a quick look to see where Google may point me.
The Office for National Statistics suggests that over the past 30 years, British couples have waited increasingly longer before marrying. In the early 1990s, many couples wed within a couple of years of meeting, often without living together first; only about 60% cohabited before marriage in 1994. Today, over 90% of couples cohabit before marrying, and surveys show the average relationship lasts around 4.9 years before the wedding.
According to some analysis of ‘partnership cohorts’ that I read, in the 1980s, over half of cohabiting couples married within five years, compared with just one-third in the 2000s. Same-sex couples, who gained marriage rights in 2014, often had especially long pre-marriage relationships, with 43% together 4–7 years and 34% together 1–3 years before marrying.
I found an article on brides.com which summed up the very modern problem of which date, “Deciding which anniversaries to celebrate as the years go on is very partner/marriage specific”.
So, the trend is rising marriage ages and the normalisation of long-term cohabitation. In that case, the date of any ‘anniversary’ that may be celebrated is likely to change to reflect better how long people have been together. In the end, I guess an anniversary should be what the couple define it to be – a personal milestone worthy of a big celebration or a quiet meal in Soho. Perhaps, PY and I are right. It’s when you met, not when you signed the paper.