Sunday Night With John: It's a Friend-A-Versary

Spending most of my twenties single, lead to a number of invitations to relationship milestone celebrations for everyone else. This lead to a number of gifts I had to happily give out to friends and families on big occasions. Being single for that long meant a of lack of traditional celebrations for me to invite people to unless you count completing another level on my favorite video game a worthwhile event to send out invitations for. I doubt anyone would show up to that party.

My two best friends also spent a majority of their twenties single and attended a number of these adult relationship life markers as well. While I have no problem and believe fully that life moments should be celebrated, I felt at the time we had a narrow lane for celebrating our relationships. There are countless unique relationships we all carry but often don't celebrate. It was in that vein that I contacted my two best friends, Kyle and Braden and asked if they wanted to participate in an event celebrating our friendship over the last 9 years. Let’s call it a Friend-a-versary, because that is what I coined the event. Braden, Kyle and I had forged a bond over years of helping each other through college, break-ups, vacations, late nights, and early mornings. A big reason why I am the man I am today is due to the pull these two wonderful guys had on my character. I knew even in 2011, it was weird, kind of funny, and a little attention seeking but I felt even though it wasn’t traditional this type of bond and commitment should be celebrated.

Braden and Kyle both laughed out loud when I proposed the idea of our 2011 Friend-a-versary: Celebrating 9 years of Friendship Bliss, but they both agreed our bond should, and now would be celebrated by our family and friends. We picked out a day, had t-shirts made and invited our friends to come celebrate 9 years of friendship. Our friends showed up with a cake and gifts and we reminisced about our adventures. A funny thing happened during our little silly event, the reasons we held the event became real. As I looked around at my friends and our event, I understood why it’s so important to keep celebrating the people who actively stay in your life. 5 years have passed since we have celebrated our friendship. Two of us are married, one of is a father and we still are shaping each other lives. Maybe not as much as we did the first 9 years we spent together but we keep adding memories, offering advice, laughing at other stupid stuff, wearing our Friend-a-versary shirts and cheering for our successes.

We haven’t repeated our event, but that doesn’t mean I’m not scheming and thinking about doing it again after we have been friends for 18 years. Great relationships, no matter their title, deserve to be celebrated, even if when you explained the event to your mother she rolled her eyes and wondered how her son cooked up this idea. I will always smile back and say, “I will never stop cooking up ideas celebrating the wonderful people in my life, they deserve it, we all do.”