Last week was my wedding anniversary. We’ve been together for 20 years and married for 17 of them. We started going out when I was 18 and married at 21. You can do your own maths for our current ages as we continue to careen – being as it is also my birthday next week – into full and proper middle age.

Let’s be honest, 17 years is really not long enough for me to offer you any treatises on marriage or anything like that. Much like the bloke who writes a parenting book while his children are toddlers, I acknowledge I have plenty of years yet, and even more sin in me, to mess this up! Even apart from that, I am conscious of the mess I have already brought to my marriage and am in no position to proffer wisdom on that front. So don’t worry, this isn’t going to be that sort of post.

Yet, 17 years is not nothing. The average length of a marriage in the UK is around 12 years. So, we’re at least above average! The figures drop dramatically for same-sex marriage, with male ones lasting less than 8 years and female ones little over 6. Longevity in marriage – and, as I said, 17 years really isn’t that long – is increasingly rare. My wife and I have largely left behind that period of our life in which most our friends got married and weekends were chocabloc with weddings. Some while ago, we moved into that far more depressing period of finding more and more of them getting divorced. Each one a little reminder that there, but for the grace of God, go I.

There was a period a while back where we didn’t really do or make much of our anniversary. I’m not sure when exactly, but I remember making a specific pitch for us to stop doing that. I was adamant that marriage is important and recognising our marriage really did matter. It didn’t matter so much what we did or how we did it, but I was adamant it was important to mark it. I did not want to take our marriage for granted, even if that meant just acknowledging it more formally once a year and recognising that another year has passed but we nevertheless remain married and that is something to celebrate.

Indeed, I think this is biblical. Hebrews 13:4 says, ‘marriage should be honoured by all’. I appreciate, in the context, it means honoured in the same way as honouring a contract. That is to say, don’t go breaking it – whether yours or anybody else’s! So, just to be clear, I don’t think the writer is telling everybody to celebrate everybody else’s anniversaries or to bow and scrape to married people. I don’t think that is the honour all are due to give. It’s pretty clear – if you read the rest of the verse – the honour due is simply recognising where marriages exist and not engaging in the kind of sexual immorality that undercuts it.

But that doesn’t change the fact that marriage takes work. The kind of consistent, faithful love that mirrors the love of Jesus for his church requires effort. There is, after all, a reason why 1 in 2 marriages end in divorce and most people don’t make it past 12 years. Marriage is hard. Marriage takes work. But like lots of things that are hard and take work, it is good and satisfying and worthwhile when we commit to it.

That means, I think, each year we have remained committed to it, and stand at the start of another year in which we will recommit to it warrants marking in some way. Indeed, the commitment of last year is worth celebrating and the promise of another year seems worth marking. After all, we had a big knees up when we first got married when standing up in front of a room full of people promising a load of stuff we haven’t even done yet is far less impressive than actually doing it, year after year, for 17 years. And, I appreciate, that is far less impressive again than those guys, like our parents, who have been faithful to those promises for decades. That sort of faithful commitment at least warrants noting a bit, doesn’t it?

I have made no secret of my view of weddings (see here and here, for example). But I really, genuinely do think marriage is excellent. Marriage is the essential building block of society and where stable, faithful, long-term, committed marriages exist, they rightly ought to be celebrated. And so, for that reason, it may only be 17 years, but I can think of nothing better than to make sure I mark that meaningfully with my wife. Such yearly celebratory recommitment might well be part of God’s means to help us towards 17 more, and hopefully even more after that.