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By India McCarty
Social media star “Dude Dad” Taylor Calmus celebrated his anniversary with wife Heidi — and reflected on what it means to “choose” your partner.
“Today Heidi and I celebrate 14 years of marriage and I’m looking back on the day I proposed,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “We were 24. We were young and broke and still figuring out who we were.”
Calmus continued, “I hadn’t been giving marriage much thought but then one day I realized that everything I was looking for in a partner was sitting across from me at Denny’s sharing a $2 plate of biscuits and gravy. Someone who was compassionate, motivated and loved people like her heart was on fire.”
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“So on January 1st of 2011, I took her out on a random road near her parents house in Fargo ND. I wrapped a rubber band around the shutter of my buddy’s camera and told her I wanted to take pictures of us dancing,” he wrote. “When she saw the ring she tackled me into the snow with an ever so enthusiastic YES.”
Calmus then shared his thoughts on what it means to choose your partner — not just when proposing, but every day of your relationship.
“Now, just a few months ago I realized that we as couples should not just propose once, but every single day,” he explained. “Choosing each other over and over again even when the setting isn’t beautiful and our hair [is] not done. The physical act of stopping life just long enough to drop to one knee, look in each other’s eyes and say, ‘I choose you.’”
Calmus added, “Hey @heidicalmus will you marry me? Today?”
The couple have made a career out of sharing their family life online, from funny skits about sending the kids back to school to home improvement and construction videos.
“It’s a dream come true. There’s no other way to put it,” Calmus said of their social media work in an interview with Fatherly. “I do not take lightly the fact that I literally have the best job in the world, with the best people that I could work with, my family, for one.”
He continued, “It’s allowed me and my wife to be at home together. Sometimes it’s crazy and we’re distracted, and we’ve got this and that going on, and we don’t sound like we’re just a family getting to hang out all day together doing fun stuff. But it definitely does give us flexibility and the ability to go out and do fun stuff and make it part of our job.”
In one recent post, Calmus reflected on the couple’s relationship, writing, “Find yourself a lady who will let you buy a house site unseen and then renovate it yourself for the next 5 years.”
“But the biggest accomplishment of all of this wasn’t the house — It was our relationship,” he said of the finished project. “Our ability to handle this type of stress, decision making fatigue, and constant layer of dust on everything is proof enough that we have what it takes to go the distance, or at least… a couple more days.”
Calmus’ anniversary post is a sweet tribute to his marriage — as well as an inspiration to anyone looking for a fun way to show your partner how much you care.
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