This past Saturday, we celebrated five years of marriage. Wedding days are, without stating the obvious, very special days. For us it had an extra dimension as it meant no more long distance loving. What a relief! Getting married after being in a long distance relationship for years is a bit of a gamble as you are hoping it wasn’t all a fluke but instead real love and true compatibility, no matter how strongly you’ve believed in it. Well friends, we made it to five years and we’re still so very much in love. We talked about it a lot on how to celebrate this milestone, going back and forth between various ideas like a big romantic dinner, a weekend away, a night in a fancy hotel, etc. We eventually realized we simply wanted a more intimate setup to connect with each other, to look back at those first five years of marriage and also look forward together at what we want the next five to be. It was perfect and memorable! I still wanted to do something special and sentimental during that one on one time that is how I came up with this ‘Message in a bottle’ idea.

I designed and printed out a sheet with ‘GRATITUDES’ written on one side and ‘HOPES’ on the other and throughout the night we noted down all the things we were grateful for this past five years and also all the things we were hoping to accomplish or work on in the coming five years. We then rolled that piece of paper and put it inside the champagne bottle – we first had to empty it of course haha – and marked on it with five. That simple creative exercise brought us right back to our dating days and when we were unveiling our hearts to get to know each other. It reinforced my belief that often the simplest things injected with creativity are the best things. We plan on reading what we wrote in five years and continue the tradition.

I would encourage you to do this with your significant other as it is such a nice eye opener and will allow you to kind of ‘check-in’ with each other and also with yourself. You don’t even need a big reason it could simply be a date idea. You can also use the sheet on your own and do some personal heart searching. Either way this is what you would need for this little creative exercise:

• A bottle (champagne, wine, beer, other)
• A marker (appropriate color for your bottle)
• The ‘GRATITUDES/HOPES’ sheet (download here)
• A pen
• Rubber bands to keep the sheet rolled up

I tend to be sentimental and my husband is more the practical type so this idea had the perfect balance of what we both like and how we communicate.

REVERIE MINGLES: WHAT CREATIVE YET SIMPLE IDEAS HAVE YOU COME UP WITH TO STRENGTHEN THE RELATIONSHIPS IN YOUR LIFE?

{DOWNLOAD} GRATITUDES+HOPES SHEET