I turned 32 on Wednesday and it was charmingly low-key. I worked from home to mark the occasion—well, it was coincidence, really; my new company has a fairly benevolent policy towards Work From Home Wednesdays, and I figured, given the choice, that it would be more fun to wear my slippers on the day of my birth than not wear my slippers—and man, I do not know how I did that for six months. It was lovely and quiet and I was highly productive, of course, but I was also dying to talk to someone by about hour three.

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They tell you marriage is hard. They tell you it involves sacrifice and compromise. And this weekend, Internet, I found out just how true that all is. I agreed to arrive at the Denver airport five hours early so that my husband could watch the Superbowl.

Did you hear me? Five hours early? At the airport? So I could sit in a mediocre sports bar and nurse a watery beer over my Oprah magazine while barrel-chested men bumped fists around me? I'll take that medal engraved with my full name, thank you.

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Today is my second wedding anniversary.

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It's July 28th, fifteen years ago, and we meet on a beach in Connecticut. Oh, we are still so far then from where we are now—married, a mortgage, nervous plans for that second bedroom—and it's summer in suburbia, and I'm just a bored teenager who thinks nothing interesting is ever going to happen to me, and then you ride in on your bike, and it's like everything clicks on.

After that, there's a line straight down the middle of my life: a before and an after. Part A and part B. Without you, without you, without you—then with you.

************

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Today is our first wedding anniversary! This time last year, I was sitting on the living room floor in my parents' house, making my bouquet. Right now I'm sitting in bed, drinking a mimosa and eating a pain au chocolat. It seems insane that a year has gone by, not least because I still haven't made a wedding album, had my dress cleaned (whoops!), framed that rather kind note from our close buddies the Obamas, or done anything with the postcards we had people fill out for our guest book.

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One of the nice things about marrying a person you've known for six hundred bajillion years is that there's a pretty good chance his parents still live in the town where you met. My parents used to live there too, of course, which makes any visit back an exercise in fitful nostalgia. There's your old house, says Sean as we drive past it, and I crane my neck to peer into the kitchen. That's where my brother and sister used to wait for the school bus. There's the store where we bought our bread and our milk.

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Your eyes do not deceive you, I do indeed have a new website. Well, not a new website; more like a gently and professionally buffed-up one. A redesign, I believe the kids are calling it, though I prefer to call it a small cosmetic surgery: the equivalent of calf implants, perhaps. Just a little boost!

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One of the things I wasn't expecting about marriage is how soon afterwards you start thinking about having kids. I'm sure it's not this way for everyone, of course---plenty of people have kids without being married, plenty of people get married and don't want kids---but for me, at least, it's been something of an eye-opener. And when I say it's been something of an eye-opener, I want you to imagine someone dropping a bucketful of ice down the back of my shirt just as I'm starting to fall asleep. That kind of eye opener.

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About a month ago, Sean decided to grow a beard. I don't know why, exactly: maybe because it was winter and it seemed a manly thing to do---Man freezing! Man grow hair! Scarf for little girl, man say!---or perhaps it was a daring sociological expose into the general public's reaction to hirsuteness, who knows? Maybe he just got lazy and decided he was going to stop shaving. (More than likely that last one.)

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