<a href="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/honeymoon2.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-361" title="honeymoon2" src="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/honeymoon2.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="375" /></a>
<h5 style="padding-left: 240px;">Jason and I, on our honeymoon two years ago.</h5>
On Wednesday, my friend Jen and her husband Kurt celebrated their 14th wedding anniversary. Next Wednesday, Jason and I will celebrate our second.

Time is strange. On one hand, two years can seem like a serious amount of time; lined up next to 14 years, though, it's nothing. At certain moments, I feel like Jason and I have been together for two decades—I can hardly recall my life without him—but at other times it seems like we just met.

<strong>When my friends celebrate anniversaries of ten or more years, my first feeling is pure joy.</strong> They chose well, they've worked hard, they've struggled and loved and come out mostly smiling more than a decade later. It's an accomplishment, without a doubt.

<strong>My second wave of emotion feels more like a pang of sadness or loss than a leap of joy.</strong> I hate to admit it. It comes from that icky part of my psyche—that part that says it-somehow-must-be-about-me-even-though-it-clearly-isn't. There's probably a bit of my competitive side tossed in, too (Score: Jen 14, Kristin 2).
<h4>If love were a race, or a board game...</h4>
<strong>Of course, I know it's not a competition. I also know that the number of years you've been married is not a true measure of love</strong>—a couple with 40 years under their belt certainly has more stories and experiences, but not necessarily more love.

<strong>I suspect it just gets at that part of me that feels like I failed when I got a divorce.</strong> Like I was running a really long race, which I was well into, when I stepped off the route to tie my shoe and was told I had to go all the way back to the beginning to start over.

Now that I think of it, there were too many board games in my childhood like that. I had a really difficult time being a good sport playing Candy Land, and Sorry! (Sorry, indeed.) <strong>The perfect metaphor for how I sometimes feel is that really long slide on Chutes and Ladders</strong>—the one that sends you all the way back to where you started, right when you are on the brink of winning. My brother would probably confirm that if I hit that slide, the game was over because I went stomping off in frustration.
<h4>Can time measure legitimacy?</h4>
The other part of my inner frustration is tied to the legitimacy we tend to yoke with time. A successful business is one that's consistently done well for 25 years, not two. A great baseball team has a reputation for making it to the playoffs, not just one good season (which, after all, could just be luck).

<strong>When I tell someone that Jason and I are celebrating our second anniversary, it somehow feels like we still have so much to prove.</strong> I remember that feeling from high school and college—being in a relationship that felt so significant and lasting, and not wanting to tell people that in fact we'd only been together a month. <strong>The amount of time just didn't line up with the amount of feeling.</strong>

I guess what I'm realizing is that <strong>there are things that can be tested by time and things that can't.</strong> Time, after all, is a measurable, concrete, linear element in our lives. Not surprisingly, it's a good indicator of those concrete aspects of love and relationships—commitment, problem-solving, the ability to withstand a variety of ups and downs.

<strong>But it's not a good indicator of the many abstract parts of love that can hardly be articulated, let alone measured</strong>—what people often refer to as chemistry, or deep compatibility, or being soulmates.

<strong>Time can't measure what's simply <em>right</em>, at its core. </strong>

That's what encompasses my two-year marriage. And I suspect it will serve us very well as we move forward, withstanding the test of time, just as it has been the glue for Jen and Kurt these 14 years.