Best practice: Eerily accurate anniversaries

The setting.

It is a double-date. Another couple comes to visit you and your partner. And somewhere along the evening, the inevitable questions arises: “so, how long have you guys been together?”. For most guys, it is one of the most dreaded questions, because we tend to forget. It is the adult equivalent of being singled out by your high school teacher with a question you don’t know the answer too. Your partner eyeing you while you try to remember and hastily try to put together the dates in your head … we have been together since april and that was the year before I started working in my new job and that has been … ah, no wait, it was when we first went to Italy … and the moment you answer and your partner rolls her eyes and gives the correct answer (but hey, you were close, only a 18-month difference), you know it’s an uphill battle to regain your best-partner-in-the-world-status.

I was that guy.

Enter Google Docs and my radical nerdy solution to never forget anniversaries.

I created a new Google Docs Spreadsheet which calculates the exact number of days since key anniversaries. Today, we have been married 1360 days. We met each other 2699 days ago and have been in a relationship for 2656 days.

It works pretty simple:

• I have one field with today’s date – formula=TODAY()
• I have a field for every single date I want to calculate the number of days of (e.g. when we were married, 18th of May 2013)
• I have another field that subtracts the second date (our marriage) from today’s date and uses standard time formatting days (you can select this from the menu) to calculate the number of days.

As Google Sheets is pretty flexible, there are plenty of tools that can help you with sending you an email with the updated number of days every day or even turn it into a chatbot.

Here you are. An eerily accurate way to calculate anniversaries. So next time the question arises “so, how long have you guys been together?”, you’re definitely #winning.