Connections, Reconnections

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It’s been a funny old week in our house. We’re got a house guest, we’ve had a very uneventful 10th wedding anniversary and we’ve attended an old friend’s wedding.

Incidentally, for those of you approaching a 10th wedding anniversary, you’ll be pleased to know that it’s known as the “tin” or “coal” anniversary. Nothing more prestigious that that. Sorry.

Since I’m not a fan of birthdays, anniversaries or other ‘special’ days created to sell greetings cards, I don’t get into gifts and cards the way I’m expected to. Saying that, at least I remembered it this year. We both have a habit of forgetting our wedding anniversary, so when I reminded Lisa at 3pm on the 1st July, she was raging with herself. Yes, she’d been hoping to catch me out, but had forgotten as well!

The very next day we had a wedding to attend. It comprised a crowd that we haven’t hung around with much since our carefree university days. We kind of drifted away from them. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why, but as one of the first couples in that group to get married, we quickly arrived at the “dirty nappies and sleepless nights” stage. Those things that the still-carefree friends couldn’t really relate to.

Now and again, we’d end up at an event with some of these people and reconnecting with them would be great fun. They’ve kind of aged in a different way to us, and they seem in the main to be quite a warm, tight-knit little community. It kind of makes you yearn for the same thing.

At the wedding reception, Lisa and I fluttered around chatting to people, rediscovering our inner social butterflies. If there was a buzzword of the night, it was “Reconnection”. You do end up with the warm and fuzzies when alcohol and light hearted banter collide to make a fantastic night. And before we even talked about it the next day, Lisa and I had decided individually that this time we needed to maintain those connections. Not just let the moment pass.

Maybe it’s the timing – family has proven to be unreliable over the last couple of years. We’re probably both at the stage where we need to expand our social circles and invite more people in. By a strange co-incidence, we had a visit the next day. And though we were hung over in a serious way, we invited the couple to stay on and share a Chinese with us.

The end result, as the weekend draws to a close, is that we both feel tremendously positive and dare I say it, even a little bit younger. When we come back from holiday, we’re going to make an effort to maintain some of those connections and see what happens. Why not?