This time eleven years ago I was going through the whole rigmarole of getting my hair, nails and make up done, hoping I'd fit into my wedding dress and trying not to rip a hole in my stockings. Holger was probably sitting quietly but nervously having a coffee, having taken all of 15 minutes to put on his suit and comb his hair.
D Day had arrived.
When I was sitting here thinking about what I could say about the past 11 years all that kept popping into my mind were lots of funny things, stuff which is probably trivial to anyone else but had us in stitches at the time and we still chuckle over. That's got to be a good thing! Being from different cultures has always been one of the defining facts of our relationship. New Zealanders and the Dutch are basically similar of course but we approach things differently. I tend to be a bit more spontaneous (a.k.a. disorganised) whereas I've always called hubby my 'long term planner' because that's what he does; he plans things out. On our very first date he told me "I never thought I'd end up marrying a Kiwi". Frankly it's a miracle that I agreed to a second date after that chestnut but hey, he was right at the end of the day.
When I rang my Mum to tell her I was dating a Dutch man she was aghast. "But how do you talk to each other?!" she exclaimed. Hubby spoke quite good English even back then so it wasn't a problem, but language is a topic that frequently pops up, as we both have become fluent in each others native tongue and try to understand the finer points. We have each made some funny mistakes. I remember hubby telling me that he could just reach something on a high shelf if he "stood on the edges of the fingers on his feet". Another time he was attempting to explain to a lesbian friend the importance of integrating yourself into the Dutch bureacratic system and told her "it's really important that you get penetrated in Holland".
Once his ship was in port for a day and I couldn't go to see him so his Mum said she'd go. I gave her a letter for him and I thought I'd written on the envelope 'for my hedgehog', a joke about his prickly whiskers as he only shaved every second day when he was at sea. However I misspelt the word egel as eikel and instead wrote 'for my penis'. To this day I've never been able to mention it to his Mum, who knows what she thought at the time. Being a man hubby was no doubt quite proud of it; in some respects there are no cultural differences between the male species at all!
At the end of the day I guess it's our differences that attract people, the fun and occasionally challenging task of figuring out what makes the other one tick. Wouldn't the world be a boring place if we were all the same? Marriage would be anyway.
Happy anniversary honey xxx
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