I went to a 25th wedding anniversary – and had a revelation about relationships | Zoe Williams

When I looked around that room, at all the marriages, love affairs and divorces, everything and everyone was as you would have expected back in 2001 ...

An army dude once told me, “A speech should be like a lady’s skirt: short enough to be interesting, long enough to cover the main points”, and I said, “Wait, can we just clarify what the main points of a lady are – is it her butt or some other, nearby part?”. He pretended not to hear me. Or to be fair, maybe he was a bit deaf and that’s how feminism came to pass him by. Few would disagree with the principle, though – whatever you want to say, keep it brief.

But yesterday I went to a 25th wedding anniversary, where I would have loved for the speeches to be 10 times as long. I could have listened to them all day. The couple looked pretty much exactly the same as they did 25 years ago, which was mysterious and diverting, but that’s not what gave heft to what they said. Rather, whatever endearing thing they said about each another, the quarter century that just flew by was proof that it was real. Comparing it to a wedding speech, it was like the difference between a huckster at a Ted Talk telling you that one day you wouldn’t need to sleep because you’d have a sleep-robot inside your brain, and a real scientist explaining how she’d discovered the cure for cancer.