On my eleventh anniversary

My doctor gave me cough syrup with codeine, so forgive me as I was nostalgic. It seems to me that marriage is a lot like motherhood. You make (in this day and age) a conscious decision to do it, and then you jump in with both feet, forever. There are hard times, and there are good moments, and even if the good moments don't outnumber the hard times, they do outweigh them. Some days you wonder why you ever agreed to such a thing. You think that, had you known what it would be like, you never would have signed up for it. And sometimes, you envy your friends who opted not to do it.  But the good moments, they shine so brightly as to make it all worthwhile. Marriage is a good thing. You don't have to take it from me; there have been a ton of sociological studies showing that having a formal legal marriage system benefits not only the people who avail themselves of it but also society as a whole. Domestication is good for the species.  But also, it is good for the individual. To say to someone, "I love you so much that I'm willing to smell your morning breath, to walk into a bathroom you've just left and smell your poop, to be without makeup in front of you, to see you at your worst as well as your best, for the rest of my life, as long as it means I get to be with you."  There is such a freedom in not having to impress so much, in not having to keep up appearances or worry about making a good first impression. There is freedom in being able to say, "I've found my partner, the one person, in this world of 6 billion people, who will bear witness to my life and to whose life I will bear witness. And now that I've found that person, I can stop the search and move on with living a life worth witnessing."  I am so glad that I found Tom, and that we met when we were both at a stage in life where we could fall in love and make it work.