Vows Renewal is to marriage or marital relationship what water, air and sunshine is to plant. It has the potential to reignite the fire of your love for each, strengthen it and make it blossom. It offers you the opportunity to appreciate your love for each other, give thanks for your love for each other and to reaffirm your love for each other. It can help you fall in love all over again or renew your love.

A milestone may be defined as a roadside marker that lists the distance to a location. Figuratively, “milestones” refer to the psychological markers created by life-changing events or life transitions such as movement from babyhood to childhood, from childhood to teenager, from teenager to adulthood and so on and so forth.

The ancient Romans placed “special” stones on the roadside. These stones were placed a mile apart. As a result, these stones became known as or referred to as a “milestone”. The ancient Romans did this to help travellers to assess the distance they have travelled or covered and to gauge how far and how long they would have to travel to get to their destination.

Life is often described as a journey. So, with the passage of time, these physical markers on the roadside have been utilized as psychological markers people placed in their heads to mark their life’s journey. Many ancient cultures used ritual ceremonies to help people along life’s journey. Such rituals helped people to transition from one stage of life to the next.

Many people celebrate or mark their birthdays and anniversaries. The wedding brings to birth your marriage to your spouse. It creates a new relationship. It is not all marriages that last for even six months or a year. A lot of marriages break down within the first five years. So, if yours has survived a year, two or five, ten etc, it is worth celebrating. It’s important that you celebrate all of your milestones and major accomplishments and certainly, your marriage or journey together is worth the time, energy and the resources to celebrate. 

There are many reasons and benefits for marking a milestone. Celebrating provides us a sense of accomplishment, and it’s an excellent way of rewarding ourselves for a job well done.

Give thanks to friends and family, and to the creator if you are a believer. It offers the chance to reflect on where we have been and where we are heading, identify what has gone well and did not go so well and how we can do things differently or better going forward.

It helps us to honour the past and let go, and welcome the opportunities and challenges ahead.

It enables us to say goodbye to the past and enter the next stage of our lives with confidence and clarity of purpose.
It is an acknowledgement that life is a gift, and shows a sense of appreciation and attitude of gratitude and makes us enjoy what we have, rather than dwelling on what we don’t have or only on what we want in the future. It makes us live in the here and now. To set a date and time aside to celebrate your marital milestones allows you to slow down and give thanks for every moment. The act of slowing down allows us to notice everything else and it boost our well-being.

When we fail to celebrate or mark the milestone in our life, everything bleed when they bleed into one another, you can’t quite remember what day or stage of life you are at or even whether you’ve actually left the previous life-stage or not when exactly you can say you’ve reached this or that.

It helps to reinforce familiar bonds with loved ones.

By identifying, acknowledging, and celebrating defining moments like wedding anniversary would work like acupuncture needles electrifying your body’s energy and meridian points in energetic pattern.

Seline Shenoy-founder and writer of the popular blog “The Dream Catcher” has listed among other points the following benefits for celebrating milestones like wedding anniversaries. Instilling a sense of meaning and significance to our lives:

The special rituals and practices that highlight important landmarks such as weddings, birthdays all serve significant purpose. Taking in the customary rites (cutting cakes and drinking champagne) reconnects us to the importance of the role that an occasion plays within the grand scheme of our lives. It instils a sense of reverence and gratitude for the gift of life and joins us to something bigger than ourselves.

It adds fun and excitement to our lives: Celebrations can be incredibly fun and offers us with the perfect opportunity to participate in the joys of life such dance, song, food, play and laughter. Who does not look forward to the fun-filled events where we can let our hair down and take a break from our mundane existence? The little child within us still relishes in the excitement of an upcoming celebration and this is an emotion that we deserve to indulge in as adult too.

We take our place in the circle of life: When we commemorate special occasions, we are basically connecting with our humanity and the commonality that we share with those who have gone before us. We tap into the timelessness of the human spirit when we take the time to pay respect to the important rites of passages that were celebrated by our ancestors in the past years

People celebrate their birthdays, a religious holiday such as Christmas, Easter, New Year, Ramadan, Yom Kipur, or even the anniversary of a famous battle. People also celebrate promotion at work, long service, retirement etc. These days, some couples celebrate their divorce because the divorce marks a major turning point in their lives.