Seventeen Years

Zara blazer (similar)
Noul sweater (similar)
Mavi jeans (c/o)
Mango boots
Louis Vuitton handbag
Zara sunglasses (similar)
Celine necklace
Linjer rings (c/o) (similar)
Location: Small Mercies Co. – Winnipeg, Manitoba

It was a Monday, seventeen years ago, just like it’s Monday today. Most people don’t go on a first date on Monday, but we were still kids – maybe the days of the week didn’t matter as much, or maybe we just couldn’t wait. Either way, seventeen years ago today, Ian and I went on our first date.

Most people don’t keep celebrating the anniversary of when they started seeing each other after their wedding. But for us, both dates are equally important. Getting married meant a fun party, and I loved wearing the dress, I’ll never deny it. But we were full partners before September 5, 2010. Frankly, our partnership was pretty well sealed after that first night out.

I don’t remember what I wore on May third of 2004, surprisingly. But if I guess, I think it was probably my favourite black sweater and a pair of flared jeans from Buffalo by David Bitton. Seventeen years ago, I was only eighteen, just finished my first year of university. How grown up I felt was inversely proportionate to how grown up I was in reality. That might be unusual now, but it was pretty normal in the 2000s, when there wasn’t a video on the internet to teach you how to do well… anything you might want to learn how to do. While I quickly found it hard to envision a future without Ian in it, my vision for what that future would look like was a lot less clear.

I’m sure I wanted to believe I’d be a famous novelist now, living in Paris and writing books. But even seveteen years ago, I was beginning to understand that possibility was remote and unrealistic. I couldn’t think of a suitable alternative, though – still can’t, if I’m honest. In the next five years, I learned that I will, to some degree, grow to hate any activity as soon as it becomes my work, which left me with a choice to make: write for a living or continue to enjoy it.

The decision was an easy one, in the end, but it wasn’t one I made quickly. I took my time trying different things to see what I might like. In fact, we’ve both taken circuitous routes in our careers, changing directions more than once – we’ve allowed each other the space and flexibility to do that, while still remaining very much a team. We’ve been a couple since the first, but in a lot of ways we grew up together, too, which is part of what’s made our journey these past seventeen years so interesting.

We’ve seen the world together. Changed jobs and cities and plans. Sometimes repeatedly. I can say with complete certainty that neither of us expected we’d be celebrating our seventeenth anniversary in Winnipeg during year two of a global pandemic. SARS was only about a year in the past when we first met. As I recall, we were both only dimly aware of newspaper articles about it. In the world before smart phones and constant news updates, it was possible to feel like a crisis was truly happening somewhere else, to someone else, especially when you were young. I wonder, sometimes, about how crazy we would have made our parents with endless phone calls if we’d live through a lockdown back then. Our homes were an hour apart, but would never have let that disconnect us. (Stubbornness is a quality we share.)

I didn’t own a single blazer seventeen years ago. Blazers, I thought, naively, were for people with office jobs. These days, I own half a dozen blazers and I have the corporate career to go with them. This is my most often repeated date night outfit these days. While restaurants remain open here in Winnipeg, case counts continue to mount, so we’ll be celebrating this anniversary at home. If we’d bothered to think ahead to this anniversary – we didn’t – then this celebration wouldn’t be what we pictured. (For one thing, neither of us believed we’d someday be able to afford real champagne.) I think that’s almost part of the fun. We’ve been together for so long that it’s hard to remember being apart. But it’s never been boring for a minute.

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