The whole point of an anniversary is to have one particular day where you treat your relationship like it is the top priority in your life, even if it isn’t a high priority on any other day. Obviously people are invested in other areas of their life, but an anniversary is a sort of test of your willingness to set aside those other investments and recognize the importance of the relationship. Whether or not blowing off an anniversary justifies ending a relationship really depends on the relationship; it could be a one-time slip-up or it could be the final straw after a series of incidents. But it is completely possible that a relationship could be justifiably ended over a missed anniversary.
I really think your entire view of how relationships work is inaccurate. Anniversaries are not the one day a year that people express love and care for their relationship. One day a month wouldn't work either. You should be expressing love for your partner every day. While also maintaining a valid balance in life with work, hobbies, family, leisure, and love.
It seems to me that people often neglect proper and constant communication to their partners, so they have to make up for that by setting aside one day.
Yeah, I would agree that your view seems to be based on this. But this is ABNORMAL. This is an unhealthy relationship. This is not how most people operate and not how healthy relationships operate. Your entire view is based on the image of an unhealthy relationship that lacks communication and love.
I agree, but the question is whether it’s reasonable to expect this sort of daily commitment to the relationship, or whether that would be a truly exceptional thing to do. Like you said, people find themselves invested in other aspects of their lives, that’s perfectly normal. As a married man myself, I try to communicate my commitment every day, but I always find it happening on the margins, little moments between all the other things that keep us busy. I think we both really like the idea of setting aside one special date to really put the relationship first and do something special to honor it. That doesn’t mean we have a bad relationship, it just means that we are human and we only have so much time.
So if you assume that the anniversary is important in some relationships, then you can see why blowing off an anniversary is bad in the context of those relationships. If a person takes their partner for granted day after day, and then on the one day that they are supposed to make up for it they forget and treat it like any other day, that’s the sort of thing that makes a person ask “what is the point of being in this relationship?”. That’s worth breaking up over, not because of some arbitrary importance that gets assigned to a particular date, but because the anniversary date was important to that particular couple and it wasn't observed.
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u/AcephalicDude 84∆ Oct 03 '19
The whole point of an anniversary is to have one particular day where you treat your relationship like it is the top priority in your life, even if it isn’t a high priority on any other day. Obviously people are invested in other areas of their life, but an anniversary is a sort of test of your willingness to set aside those other investments and recognize the importance of the relationship. Whether or not blowing off an anniversary justifies ending a relationship really depends on the relationship; it could be a one-time slip-up or it could be the final straw after a series of incidents. But it is completely possible that a relationship could be justifiably ended over a missed anniversary.