What we expect from an anniversary

Celebrating a date readily passes for an empty convention, imposed by commerce, to which free spirits would attach no importance. This position is widespread and rarely held to the end: forgetting a date, even by someone who declared it of no interest, produces an effect.

The gap between the discourse and the reaction indicates that the object fulfils a function the discourse does not describe.

A ritual has three properties: it returns on a fixed date, it follows an agreed form, and it is shared. These three properties make it predictable, and it is precisely predictability that makes it valuable: it does not ask to be invented each time, it is content to be kept.

Its function is to make visible what is no longer seen. A daily relationship is made of exchanges whose value one stops perceiving through sheer habituation. The ritual interrupts that habituation at regular intervals, without requiring anyone to have anything new to say.

Forgetting a date is not a failure to observe a convention, it is information: the relationship did not occupy enough space for the date to come to mind. It is that reading, and not the missed gesture, that produces the reaction.

This mechanism explains why making up for it does not work well. A present brought the next day corrects the gesture and not the information, and the person receiving it knows that, which often makes the repair more painful than the forgetting.

Calendar dates are not the only rituals of a relationship, nor the most important. The morning coffee, the call at a fixed hour, a reused expression, a way of saying goodnight constitute domestic rituals, more frequent and less commented on.

They share the same property: their interruption is perceived immediately, while their presence no longer is. That is the nature of things that work, and it also holds for what a relationship is reproached for no longer having.

A ritual maintains, it does not repair. Expecting an annual evening to settle what is wrong the rest of the year is an error of destination, and the failure of that expectation produces an additional disappointment.

Its modesty is its quality. It maintains attention at regular intervals, which is little and which nothing else does in its place.