“My wife might call for medical help if I ever did anything to celebrate our anniversary,” says John Mackie, revealing how he and his wife Mary will mark the 30 years they’ve spent as a married couple. By doing absolutely nothing.
The 65-year-old from Scotland says every year around the day of his wedding – a date he no longer remembers – he and his wife have forgone the romantic dinners, cards, presents and giant heart-shaped balloons that society says they’re expected to exchange. “Perish the thought,” he says.
And this isn’t just laziness born out of decades of commitment. The couple, who have three children together, refused to celebrate anniversaries or Valentine’s Day from the start of their relationship. Even their wedding was low-key – the registrar had to lend Mackie her own ring for the vows because the couple decided not to bring any.
“We have a distaste for it all,” Mackie explains to me over email. “This is probably for many reasons: not showing-off, not tempting fate, feeling it’s superficial, material, and trivial in comparison with the relationship, and not needing that kind of mutual reinforcement.”
In fact, Mackie goes so far as to say that to celebrate now would be a “sure sign” something was going wrong in their relationship – and confirms his wife feels exactly the same way.
They aren’t the only ones to buck the trend – a survey from 2016 found 46% of British couples don’t bother marking their wedding date, and a fifth didn’t even know when their anniversary date was.
Celebrities such as Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, who’ve been married for more than two decades, famously admitted their anniversary means nothing to them as a couple anymore. “We don’t really celebrate that day anymore in that sense, because the context of our union is totally different,” Pinkett Smith said on a podcast earlier this year. “Our marriage is more of a life partnership.”
Daria Gerasimova, from London, who has been with her partner Josh for five years agrees that being in a long-term relationship starts to transcend those annual markers – she celebrates everyday acts of kindness instead.
The 29-year-old, who is unmarried, says they don’t even have a date which they consider their anniversary. “Our relationship developed in a very fluid way where we just became a couple over time,” she explains. “We’ve never had the whole ‘are we exclusive?’ or ‘will you be my girlfriend/boyfriend?’ chat.”
The couple know roughly which month they first started seeing themselves as a couple because they did a pub crawl to watch Eurovision: “We could look up the date that was, but we never bothered.” Every now and then they decide to watch Eurovision as a “homage” to that first night but Gerasimova says it’s “absolutely not” a tradition: “We didn’t have a formal start to our relationship, so perhaps we don’t feel like having an anniversary date is important.”
“We didn’t have a formal start to our relationship, so perhaps we don’t feel like having an anniversary date is important..."”
Instead, Gerasimova values regular gestures, small gifts or thoughtful touches from her partner. “Josh travels a lot for work, so sometimes I’ll get his favourite snacks and drinks and leave them in the fridge for his return,” she says. “It’s trivial but I think these small gestures really add up.
“To me, these random surprises throughout the year, no matter how small, are more important than having one big night to celebrate the anniversary.”
Shannon Bradley-Colleary says the same about her husband Henry. “I don’t need to celebrate special occasions like Valentine’s Day or birthdays or wedding anniversaries with Henry, because every day with this man is a special occasion.
“Our marriage isn’t perfect – sex can be tricky, sometimes when he laughs he looks exactly like his mother; sometimes when I sweat I smell exactly like my father’s knees – but I can count on that guy and that’s worth its weight in Valentine’s and silk pyjamas.”
Mackie agrees: “After 30 years and two further children, we sometimes get pissed together at the weekend or lie in bed of a morning discussing epistemology – and that’s what counts.”