Yesterday was my 7th wedding anniversary, and the 18th anniversary of getting together with my husband. Eighteen years equals half our lives spent together, pretty much our entire adult lives, and it feels like a pretty big deal. Last night we celebrated with homemade pizza, heart-shaped chocolate mousse cake, and supermarket special-offer champagne. On Thursday, courtesy of my MIL babysitting, we’re going out for dinner, and may even get really daring and Go Into Town. The huge advantage of grandparental babysitting is that you don’t feel the need to get the children bathed, pyjamaed, settled and behaving before you leave, you can just scarper the second they arrive, which adds a good hour onto the length of time spent out of the house.

Anyway, in between scoffing and quaffing last night, I got all philosophical on what marriage means to me. Two glasses of fizz do that to me these days. The fact is, and I’m afraid there is no way of saying this without seeming unbearably smug, but I just love being married.

I always thought I would. For years it was a real source of contention between my then boyfriend, now husband, and me, because I desperately wanted to get married, and he absolutely didn’t. Neither of us could really articulate our positions – certainly not in a way that convinced the other! He didn’t like the formality and legality of it, saw our relationship as being about us and our love for each other, not about government sanction and tax breaks. I just wanted to stand up and shout about our relationship and our love for each other.

Unlike most of our arguments, ahem, he won this one by default, because we weren’t married. Eventually I gave up. We had bought a house together, and decided to have a baby, and they seemed like pretty big indications of permanence and commitment. But then unbeknownst to me, something shifted for my boyfriend. Without my ceaseless propaganda on the benefits of marriage, and my propensity to ruin any special occasion (birthdays, Christmas, holidays etc) by getting upset that he hadn’t proposed, he started to think that, actually, marriage might not be such a bad idea after all.

Nine years ago he booked a surprise trip to Rome for our getting-together anniversary. In a roof-top bar, with the twinkly lights of one of the world’s most beautiful and historic cities spread out below us, he got down on one knee, produced a ring, and asked me to marry him.

Reader, I was astonished! And absolutely thrilled. I was four months pregnant at the time, and we decided to set a date for after the baby had arrived, and we had had a chance to get our lives back together. Little did we know, at that point, that our lives would never feel together again! We got married when Anna was 19 months old, and able to act as the cutest baby bridesmaid the world has ever seen*.

We deliberately chose to get married on the (11th) anniversary of us getting together and (2nd) anniversary of getting engaged, as we wanted to keep one very special day to celebrate our relationship.

Our wedding was low-key, low-cost and informal – our local registry office, followed by an afternoon tea and fizz reception in the beautiful garden of a local museum. The guest list was limited by the size of the registry office, and so our guests were all people we truly care about. That evening we got grandparents to babysit Anna, and headed to our local pub with the younger generation of wedding guests. Our wedding present from my parents was a honeymoon of two nights in an almost obscenely luxurious boutique spa hotel in the Cotswolds whilst they looked after Anna. It was perfect – undoubtedly one of the happiest days of our lives.

It is clearly more conventional to get married before having a baby, but doing things the other way round worked very well for us. In those crazy days of early parenthood, when you can lose all sense of yourself, and of your relationship with your partner being anything other than ‘mummy and daddy’; a tag-team of nappy-changing, sleep-deprivation and spoon-feeding of pear puree, it was so special to have a project to plan that was all about us as a couple, and about celebrating our romantic love as well as familial love.

I still find it quite hard to explain what I value so much about being married, over and above being in a loving and committed long-term relationship. I love being able to reference my ‘husband’ and people know exactly what I mean, can make an immediate judgement about the significance of our relationship. The person I held hands with in the cinema when I was fourteen was my ‘boyfriend’; the people my husband has started a business with are his ‘partners’,  but there is no ambiguity about the terms husband and wife.

It is slightly controversial for a modern feminist to change her name on getting married, but I did, and I really love sharing a family name with my husband and daughters. I like the public statement of a shared name, of my wedding ring, that we are a team, a unit. In a world that feels increasingly uncertain, I love the stability and security I find in my marriage. I love that, although at its core our relationship is deeply private and personal to just the two of us, we have shared its significance and importance with our friends and family, publicly declaring just exactly what we mean to each other.

Marriage isn’t right for everyone. It wasn’t right for us for the first eleven years of our relationship, and I certainly don’t think that invalidates our deep love for, and commitment to, one another throughout that period. And pretty obviously marriage isn’t a magic wand that means you will be happy forever – we still need to work at our marriage every day – work at putting each other first, at thinking as a team rather than two individuals, at not taking each other for granted, and in not getting so caught up in the busyness of life that we fail to spend proper time together as a couple. But for me, for us, marriage feels like a joy and a privilege.

What do you think? Are you happily unmarried and don’t see the fuss? Or married and love it that way? If you’re single at the moment, do you see ‘getting married’ as the ultimate goal of a successful relationship, or do you see it as a total irrelevance in this day and age?

*not maternal bias, just straightforward fact.