Last night, I read an email from Jordan that ended with a line asking if Mr. W and I were planning something to celebrate our 1-year anniversary coming up. That marks the 4th person who knows our timeline off-hand. How do they remember that?

1) Mr. W had approached me about 3 weeks ago and said, “We have our one-year anniversary coming up on the holiday weekend; let’s do something –” I didn’t even hear the end of that sentence as I whirled around to look at the calendar on the wall behind me. What holiday weekend? It looks like Labor Day is coming up in the beginning of September, which stands out to me because college roommie Diana had emailed me earlier that day asking if I’m gonna be in town so that she could come to LA and visit. I totally didn’t relate that to our one-year anniversary! Oops. I admitted that to Mr. W, who then laughed and admitted that the only reason he remembered was because his coworker had said to him, “Hey, you and Cindy have your 1-year coming up. Are you doing anything?” and he in turn had looked at the calendar and said, “What? When?!”

2) I had a coworker bring up to me in a conversation about vacation plans last week over lunch whether we were gonna go somewhere for our 1-year anniversary. “You have an anniversary coming up soon, you guys going anywhere?” How do you keep track of that?! Do people remember because they had bets going about how long we were gonna last or something?

3) After receiving said email from Jordan, I forwarded it to Mr. W because I thought it was so amusing. We’d met Jordan on a cruise after we’d been together almost 6 months, so it wasn’t like Jordan could “remember” when she found out or heard that we got together.

4) In response to reading the forwarded email, Mr. W said to me a little earlier, “You know who else remembered?” He named another female coworker of his, who’d asked him the other day hey, isn’t your 1-year anniversary coming up? “What the heck? How does everyone remember that? Do they all remember precisely where they were when they heard or something?” Yeah, he said, because she said she remembers it was Labor Day weekend because that’s when she was moving.

I suppose this is why women (with the exception of me) get so offended when their men forget important dates, because they’re even able to remember other people’s important dates. I had a few sheepish instances of forgetting an anniversary until some time later when I’m at work and have to date a document, and then it’d suddenly hit me, HEY! our 6-month anniversary just passed! And then I’d quickly jump on the phone and call Mr. W and say, “Do you realize we just passed our 6-month anniversary and you didn’t even say anything and we didn’t even do anything special this past weekend?!” He’d say, “Why didn’t you say anything?!” and I’d say, “I was waiting to see if you’d remember! And you DIDN’T!”
But later on I confessed. I think.