Well the anniversary has come and gone without too much of a hitch. I have been telling the W about a planned steak cookout at my Mgr’s house for about a month now. I figured we could go mingle for 2-3 hours than take off and do whatever we wanted. She had it in her mind that it was our Anniversary weekend and so that was not part of an appropriate romantic weekend activity. After much fussing and complaining about the clothes she had to wear and how she looked and felt fat in them, (she didn’t, and I could go on about her poor self-esteem despite my compliments and adoring affection and attention), we went to the hair appt. that I had already scheduled for her. She looked great when she was done. BUT, of course she still didn’t feel quite right about the clothes she had on, so we went shopping for a new outfit (mind you, we live 2 hours away, it started at 1pm and it was 1pm already when we left the salon). So now we are looking for the right outfit. Finally, an hour and $85 later, we find a suitable, flattering outfit. Back in the car she says she really doesn’t want to go; it’s already late and I am still recovering from an illness and it’s our anniversary weekend and she wanted to spend it alone with me. My lid has already boiled over several times during all this (please understand though, this scenario I just described with the shopping and stalling before going to a company event is so typical of her. It’s happened for years now.) But I have really held my tongue. Ok, so the anniversary part did make it more difficult to deal with and really took some steam out of my ranting, but I still told her that this happens every single time we are going to a company function and it always ends up costing us $100 to make her feel good enough about going. In actuality, we spent money we didn’t have any right to touch at all. I had just gotten paid on Friday and we took care of all the emergency bills to keep the car, the house, the electric, the gas, and the phone on, with little leftover for food and gas for the next 2 weeks, so the money we spent was my gas & parking money. Whatever big plans we had for any type of romantic weekend would be severely affected by our slim finances, hence, I thought we could at least enjoy the company of the small gathering at my boss’s house for a couple hours then venture out. Of course, we did not go. No need to have drag out fight over this. So now we go and have a Mexican dinner that was just so-so and we went to see Red Dragon (Ok, but Silence of the Lambs was still better.) and then returned home for an anti-climactic evening (we already had our SF session earlier in the day). She sighs and says “So much for us rekindling the romance in our relationship!” She was sad and slightly depressed I’d say. Personally, we were both disappointed about how the weekend went. Each of us had different expectations and neither of us was satisfied. I think we should have gone and enjoyed ourselves as a kick-off to the weekend. At least we did not have any real foreboding conversations about the “future”. Neither of us had even gotten a card (and it was the mushy cards I dreaded more than anything because my heart is not into this right now), so I guess we acknowledged the anniversary but were realistic about where we now stand at this time. As much I dreaded the weekend, it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been and wasn’t as good as it should’ve been!