Thirty years. A gay relationship. A lifetime of choosing each other and a little middle finger to Joel in Tulsa.

Today, I have been with MY Roy for THIRTY YEARS.

Thirty. Fucking. Years.

Let that marinate for a minute.

You know what you get for an accomplishment like that? Well, about the same thing you get for a birthday, or any other personal milestone that doesn’t involve winning an Oscar or getting elected president.

Nothing.

You might get a few congratulations. Perhaps somebody will remember to acknowledge it somewhere between their morning coffee and posting a picture of their lunch.

There isn’t a parade. Nobody shows up with a giant check. There isn’t a commemorative plaque delivered to your front door. Unless you’ve got some particularly attentive relatives, don’t hold your breath waiting for a greeting card.

Certainly, my mother won’t be sending congratulations for this particular milestone.

Hell, I turned 50 earlier this year. FIFTY. A pretty significant goddamn accomplishment, especially considering my sister didn’t even make it to that particular milestone. And I’m still waiting on a simple Happy Birthday.

I’m not holding my breath.

Getting older, eventually, you’ll stop waiting for other people to validate your life.

When you’ve spent thirty years building a life with somebody, you eventually figure out that the people standing outside your relationship don’t get to determine its value. They don’t get a vote.

You stop looking around for permission to be happy.

You stop depending on outsiders to applaud your accomplishments.

You realize that YOU are the driving force in your own story. YOU are the one who gets to decide how it unfolds. And, ultimately, YOU are the one who gets to decide how the damn thing ends.

Everything else is noise.

Trust me, after thirty years, we’ve heard plenty of noise.

Roy and I still laugh about an old hairdresser friend of his in Tulsa named Joel.

When Roy and I first met and started dating, Joel apparently offered his professional assessment of our relationship.

“I give it two weeks.”

Well, Joel.

I don’t know where you are these days, or whether you’re still doing hair, but I hope business is good.

Because we’re coming up on THREE DECADES, and we’re still here.

At this point, I’m beginning to think we might have to stay together just to be petty.

Thirty years is a long fucking time!

Think about everything that happens in thirty years. People change careers, buy houses, sell houses, gain weight, lose weight, change hairstyles, lose all their hair, discover new medications, and develop entirely new opinions about things they were once absolutely certain about.

We’ve lived through all of it together.

We’ve experienced the good, the bad, the ridiculous, the expensive, and the occasional situation where one of us has looked at the other and wondered how in the fuck we got here.

There’s another layer to our anniversary that I don’t want to overlook.

We’re GAY.

Thirty-year relationships aren’t exactly growing on trees in our community. Finding a three-year relationship is a feat.

When we started dating, we weren’t looking at a world overflowing with examples of gay couples celebrating their 30th anniversaries. We didn’t have an endless supply of older gay couples showing us what a lifetime together could look like. We were figuring things out as we went, just like everybody else, except sometimes the world wasn’t particularly interested in making that journey easy.

And here we are.

Thirty years later.

Still together. Still laughing. Still occasionally annoying the absolute shit out of each other, I’m sure.

And still choosing this life together.

I’m incredibly proud of us.

Not because we’ve done everything perfectly. We haven’t. Not because we’ve never disagreed, struggled, or wanted to throw the other one out of a moving vehicle.

Because we’ve stayed.

We’ve built something. We’ve created a history that belongs exclusively to the two of us. We have thirty years of memories, inside jokes, shared experiences, private conversations, and stories that nobody else could possibly understand.

There are entire chapters of my life that Roy is the only other person on the planet who remembers it or even knows the story.

That’s a pretty extraordinary thing.

I honestly cannot imagine doing this with anybody else.

Not because I believe relationships are always easy or that love magically solves everything. It doesn’t. Love requires patience, compromise, forgiveness, humor, and occasionally pretending you didn’t hear something the other person just said.

Somewhere along the way, Roy became my person.

My favorite person on the planet.

The person I want to tell things to. The person I want sitting next to me when something funny happens. The person I want to travel with, argue with, laugh with, grow old with, and occasionally roll my eyes at.

Apparently the person I’m going to keep proving Joel wrong with.

Here’s what thirty years has taught me.

You might not get a lot of recognition from the outside world for the life you’ve built. You might not get the birthday wishes, the anniversary acknowledgments, the family approval, or the congratulations you think you deserve.

You will realize you don’t need them.

The greatest rewards aren’t tangible.

They’re in the life you’ve created. The person who knows you better than anyone. The comfort of having somebody beside you who has seen you at your absolute best and your absolute worst and somehow hasn’t vanished in the night.

Thirty years isn’t just a number. It’s thirty years of decisions. Thirty years of showing up. Thirty years of figuring out how to do this dumb, complicated, occasionally beautiful thing called life together.

If nobody else stops to celebrate that, that’s perfectly fine.

We’ll celebrate it ourselves.

I don’t need a room full of people to tell me I’ve accomplished something special.

I wake up next to it.

Happy Thirty Years to MY Roy.

I love you. I’m proud of us. And I wouldn’t trade this life for anything.

Joel, if you’re reading this…

We made it past two weeks.

Xoxo, AB 💅💄💋