The Love We’ve Been Tending: 11 Years of Growing Together

Today is Blake and I’s 11-year dating anniversary.

An anniversary that Blake thinks is completely ridiculous to still celebrate.

According to him, once you get married, you get a new anniversary. The dating anniversary has officially been retired. We have a wedding anniversary now. That’s the one that counts.

And maybe for some people, that works.

But not for me.

Because eleven years ago today, walking home from a Swedish House Mafia concert, Blake asked me to be his girlfriend.

Such a simple question.

And neither of us could have possibly understood the life that was hiding inside of it.

I certainly didn’t.

When I met Blake, I was still carrying so much.

Before him, love had not always felt safe to me. My relationships had been incredibly one-sided, and some had been abusive. I was young. A lot had happened to me. I had lived a lot of life in a very short amount of time, and I came into our relationship with, quite frankly, a fuck ton of trauma and baggage.

And Blake didn’t care.

He never made me feel like I was too much.

He never asked me to become some polished, healed version of myself before I could be loved.

He just loved me.

And with those strong arms of his, he helped me carry some of the weight until I learned how to put it down myself.

That might be one of the greatest gifts someone can give another person.

Not saving them.
Not fixing them.
Not carrying everything for them.

Just standing beside them long enough that they begin to remember their own strength.

Over these eleven years, Blake has watched me process, unravel, heal, change my mind, reinvent myself and become a thousand different versions of the woman he first asked to be his girlfriend.

And somehow, he has loved me through all of them.

He has supported dreams that probably sounded completely insane at first. He has watched me build things, burn things down, begin again, change direction, question everything and follow the little whispers inside of me that said, go this way.

He has given me a kind of love I didn’t know existed before him.

And when I look around at our life now, it almost takes my breath away.

Our babies.

Our family.

Our careers.

Our beautiful home.

The ordinary mornings and chaotic evenings. The dreams we’ve chased. The losses we’ve carried. The seasons that stretched us. The ones that softened us. The moments that felt impossible and the ones I wish I could bottle up and keep forever.

All of it traces back to that one question.

Will you be my girlfriend?

There is something very yogic about that when I think about it.

Yoga teaches us that transformation rarely happens in one enormous, cinematic moment. A life is shaped through practice. Through returning. Through choosing again and again.

Love is a practice, too.

Ayurveda teaches us to pay attention to what we tend. What we nourish grows. What we return to becomes rhythm. What we care for, season after season, becomes part of the fabric of who we are.

And for eleven years, we have been tending this love.

Not perfectly.

But faithfully.

We have grown up together.

We have met versions of each other that didn’t exist when this relationship began. We have learned how to love one another through different seasons, different needs, different dreams and different selves.

And if I had to describe what Blake has been in my life, I think the word would be gravity.

Before him, I was floating.

Searching. Moving. Surviving. Trying to figure out where I belonged and who I was supposed to become.

Blake grounded me.

Not by clipping my wings or asking me to become smaller, but by giving me somewhere safe enough to land.

He is my gravity.

My Shiva.

The steady presence beside all of my movement and creation. The grounding beneath all of my becoming. The one who reminds me, simply by being who he is, that I can wander and explore and dream and reinvent myself because there is something steady beneath my feet.

And maybe that is why this anniversary will always matter so much to me.

Our wedding anniversary celebrates the day we stood in front of the people we love and chose each other as husband and wife.

But this anniversary?

This one celebrates the beginning.

The tiny doorway we walked through without knowing what was waiting on the other side.

Because there was no wedding without this day.

There were no babies without this day.

There was no home, no family, no eleven years of memories, no version of us as we know it now without that walk home and that one little question.

So yes, Blake.

I am going to keep celebrating our dating anniversary.

You can roll your eyes about it for another eleven years.

And hopefully another eleven after that.

Because I will never stop being grateful for the day our story became our story.

Eleven years of loving.

Eleven years of becoming.

Eleven years of choosing, repairing, laughing, grieving, dreaming, building and beginning again.

Eleven years of tending something that started between two very different people walking home from a concert and somehow grew into this whole beautiful life.

Words will never be big enough for how much I love you.

But I hope the life we keep creating together says what words never could.

Happy 11 years to us.

And happy anniversary to the question that changed my entire life. 🤍