Anniversary Gifts + My Unsolicited Opinion on Them

I’m going to be very honest and some of you may raise an eyebrow or two, but…

Devon and I are not exchanging anniversary gifts. We just aren’t. We have exchanged gifts for our dating anniversary for the entirety of our relationship, but I want our wedding anniversaries to be different.

For our wedding anniversaries, I would rather have an experience than a gift that we/each of us may or may not use/like that will eventually just take up room in our house. I don’t need a necklace from my husband to tell me he loves me and I don’t need to give him a watch to tell him I love him.

I think I was spoiled by our honeymoon last year; we had an amazing trip. We did two weeks in England and in Wales and it was incredible. I think the only thing we would have changed was staying at a hotel in London, closer to the city center. We stayed in Brentford, which is about 9 miles west of the city center, so each day, it took a little while to get to the city when we wanted to. But other than that, the trip could not have been better.

That trip gave me all the feels about wanting to travel more. It also gave us a lot of great memories like seeing some of the Northern Lights on our flight over to England, seeing Ianto’s shrine in Cardiff (Torchwood reference),

seeing all these amazing parts of a city that I’ve only seen in movies,

and eating all the delicious, delicious foods.

I look back at pictures from our trip and I remember every moment of it.

And that’s what I want for our anniversaries, I want the memories and the experiences, moreso than a gift that may get lost or broken/ruined in some way.

The way this is working in my head is that we’ll travel for our anniversaries (as we can, we recognize children will come into the mix and there may be years where going on a big trip isn’t feasible – but a couple nights away, close by, might be?) For our big “milestone” anniversaries, those will be the bigger excursions. Like we would love to go to Iceland (the few hours we had in a layover there made us want to do a full visit), Greece, Italy, we’d even like to go to Japan at some point.

For the non-milestone ones, it would be the smaller trips, like us going to Shenandoah this year. Maybe we’ll actually do Denver next year since it didn’t happen this year.

And we aren’t people who travel a lot, so it’s very plausible for us to save every year for our anniversary trip so that we aren’t breaking the bank to go.

Now, for those of you that haven’t fully shunned me for my desire to not be given gifts for our anniversary, I have compiled a list of gifts for men, women, and couples if you are looking to buy an anniversary gift for your spouse or friends/couples you know.

A couple of the things on here, we actually received for our wedding; like the Ninja blender and the NuWave Air Fryer. We love both of them and have used them both so much since we received them last year. The Barefoot dreams cardigan is an amazing gift for any occasion; they are the best thing you’ll put on your body…trust me. My husband loves pretty much anything electronic, and I think a lot of guys do, so there are a couple of electronic items that might be a good choice, as well!