Five ways to spend the thirtieth, including the one a customer invented that takes thirty weeks and has to start now.
Put your number into a search bar and you get a table. Paper at one, wood at five, pearl at thirty, and a column of places to buy each one. That table answers the question of what to wrap. Thirty years in, wrapping is rarely the part you're stuck on.
One email I've kept is a refund request:
"as unusual as it is, my wife and I both bought the same Show Her Off package as a 30th Anniversary gift for each other, and i am wondering if we can return or cancel one of them by chance."
Two people, thirty years in, separately deciding the gift should be something the two of them would do rather than something either of them would own, and separately picking the same one.
Chip and Dan Heath argue in The Power of Moments that this is how memory works in general: "when we assess our experiences, we don't average our minute-by-minute sensations. Rather, we tend to remember flagship moments: the peaks, the pits, and the transitions." That's their reading of the research rather than a finding of their own, and it explains why the table stalls out. An object doesn't make a flagship moment. It either sits inside one or it doesn't.
So use the table if you want a prompt. Pearl at thirty is a good prompt. The evening is what's still unbuilt.
The twenty-year notes I have are about something that hasn't happened. Only danced once, at the reception. Never, not even at the wedding. The thirty-year notes run the other way. The word that keeps turning up in them is "first", and it is in the past tense.
"Got it!! Already through lesson 6! First time really dancing together in 30 years. We are having a blast."
"We are in our 50's, and been married 30 years this June. We have never had the coordination to dance together, well, maybe some slow cheek-to-cheek. Last night was our first date night dancing."
And a customer wrote in about the questions I send out each week:
"This email came last weekend and I read it out loud to my husband and we talked about the questions for about an hour! And we've been married for 30 years!"
Thirty seems to be a distance at which a first is still available.
Two of those three are couples dancing together for the first time after thirty years, which is roughly what you'd expect the mail at a dance company to look like. It's also what Date Nights Dancing is for: easy swing taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, the two of you finding it out together.
Each one says why it fits thirty in particular, and what it takes out of your evenings and your wallet, so the ones that won't fit come off first. Pick one and let the others go.
Open the album from the year you got engaged, then work forward at one year a week until you reach now. This one isn't mine. Jennifer H. wrote in after a Spark about photographs and described what she and her husband were already doing:
"My husband and I are in our 30th year of marriage and shortly after the 30th anniversary of our engagement, we opened up the album from that year… so fun! Now we're working our way through 30 years of memories… one year per week!"
The tenth-anniversary version of this is Jennifer's idea shrunk to fit. At thirty you get it at full size, which is how she built it.
Why year thirty. Thirty weeks is most of a year. You can't start this the month before the date, which makes it the only idea on this page that has to begin now, and it means the anniversary is the last week of something instead of the whole of it.
What it costs. An evening to work out where the pictures live now, then ten or fifteen minutes a week. Free unless you print something at the end.
Write three questions on a card and ask them across dinner. Three of them, with nowhere to be afterward. Questions that need thirty years of answers behind them:
Why year thirty. Three questions turning into an hour is exactly what the email in the last section describes happening between two people who have talked every day for three decades.
What it costs. Nothing. Ten minutes writing them down beforehand so you're not improvising at the table.
If you're going to buy the pearl, don't buy it alone. Make the errand the date. The two of you at the counter, her choosing, lunch afterward at whatever's nearby. Decide your number before you leave the house and tell her what it is, so the afternoon is about picking, not guessing.
Why year thirty. Pearl is the thirtieth's own material, so this is the year the errand comes with a reason already attached to it. And after thirty years there probably aren't many things in your house that the two of you chose standing side by side.
What it costs. An afternoon, plus whatever number you set before you go.
Pick something neither of you can do, and be beginners at it on the same night. A cuisine you've never cooked. A language, badly, for one dinner. A dance. A customer wrote in after a first date night, thirty years married:
"Our favorite part was how approachable you both are. You made us feel comfortable with being awkward and struggling...but it got easier the more we practiced. The intimacy was in us both being new to this and experiencing it together!"
The Heaths have a line for what that couple was doing: "The promise of stretching is not success, it's learning."
Why year thirty. Thirty years is long enough that most of what the two of you do together is probably something one of you got good at first. Being equally bad at the same thing, on the same night, is the rarer condition by then, and it's the part the customer above names as the best of it.
What it costs. A few evenings before the date. If the thing you pick is dancing, that's fifteen minutes at a time in your own living room, which is the shape of the Date Nights Dancing program, no studio and no experience needed.
Take the one thing the two of you do without ever having decided to (the Saturday breakfast, the evening walk, the drive to her mother's) and move one variable in it for the anniversary. Same thing, somewhere else, or at a different hour, or with something added. Somebody thirty years into the same habit wrote this:
"My husband and I have been dancing together for 30 years but have added quite a few of your moves and it has made dancing so much more fun!"
Why year thirty. The thing you already do together is thirty years old, which is why neither of you thinks about it anymore. Moving one variable in it takes an afternoon.
What it costs. Usually nothing. It's the thing you were going to do anyway.
Thirty gets marked bigger than most years do, at least in my mail. The two versions I see most are a renewal with a party and a cruise.
"Next week we are renewing our vows for our 30th anniversary and having a party and I was trying to find the access to the modules so we can polish up our moves."
"we too are coming up on 30 years of marriage. Taking our first cruise to celebrate and ordered the videos in hopes of looking like we know what we are doing when we get on the dance floor. Lol"
A party is a room and a cruise is a boat. Whichever you're planning, put one thing inside it that the two of you built beforehand, so there's something to do when you get there. If a renewal is the shape yours is taking, the vow renewal piece goes further into the planning side.
And if there's no big thing this year, that's the ordinary case. All five ideas above run at your own kitchen table.
Four of the five run at nothing or close to it, and the most expensive one is the pearl, which is the optional one.
Thirty years does not come with a budget attached. One comment, from somebody whose thirtieth was that November:
"I want this so freaking bad,it would be perfect, just don't think I got it in my pocket book at this time."
None of the five ideas above needs money to work. If this is a tight year, the inexpensive date ideas page is built on that.
The one thing money buys here is something somebody else makes for you. Thirty years printed into a book instead of sitting on a hard drive. A table where neither of you is cooking or cleaning up. Spend there, and let everything else be the two of you.
Choose one and do the piece of it that can't be done later. If it's the year-a-week, go find the photographs tonight, because thirty weeks is the entire run-up. Otherwise book the table, or call the jeweler, or write the three questions on a card and put the card in your coat. If none of the five is right, the things to do on an anniversary list has the any-year versions.
Thirty years in, the pearl and a good table would be a perfectly decent evening, and nobody would think less of you for booking it. What you'd be doing instead takes weeks of small effort nobody else sees, ten or fifteen minutes at a time, and none of it looks like much on any given Sunday.
So start with the boxes. The album from the engagement year is in a closet, a crawl space, or at her mother's, and working out which one is tonight's job. Everything else on this page will keep for a week. That one won't.
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