What Is the Best Date to Celebrate Your Monthsary? (And Do Couples Stop After a Year?)

Every couple that celebrates monthsaries eventually hits one of three little dilemmas. You started dating on the 31st and this month only has 30 days — so when is your monthsary? Your first anniversary is coming up — do you still celebrate monthsaries after that, or is that officially over? And someone in the group chat just asked what a post monthsary date even means. This post settles all three, so the only thing left to plan is where to eat.

If you are new to the word itself, start with our guide on what a monthsary is and come back — this one is for couples who already count the months and want to get the details right.

The rule almost every couple follows is beautifully simple: whatever date you got together, that date every month is your monthsary. Started dating on the 14th of February? The 14th of every month is yours. It works exactly like a birthday, just twelve times a year instead of one.

The date people use is usually the day they officially became a couple — the proposal, the yes, the day you both agreed this was real. Some couples count from the first date, some from the first meeting. There is no wrong choice; there is only being consistent. Pick one date together, agree on it out loud, and save yourselves the classic you-remembered-the-wrong-day argument.

Couples who got together on the 29th, 30th or 31st face a genuinely funny calendar problem: some months simply do not have your date. February is the biggest offender, but every 31st couple loses out four times a year.

There are two popular fixes. The first is celebrating on the last day of the month — if your date is the 31st and the month ends on the 30th, the 30th is your monthsary. The second is moving to the 1st of the next month, treating it as the day your month completes. Most couples pick the last-day option because it keeps the celebration inside the same month. Again: either works, just decide once.

A tip from long-time monthsary couples: if the exact date lands on a brutal work day, celebrate on the nearest weekend and keep the date itself for something tiny — a message, a call, one photo. The date marks the milestone; the celebration can travel.

This is the big one, and the honest answer is: it is completely up to the two of you — but here is what couples actually do.

Many couples treat monthsaries as a first-year tradition. The first twelve months are new and every month feels like a milestone worth marking, so they celebrate all twelve, throw a proper celebration for the first anniversary, and then switch to celebrating yearly anniversaries only. If that is you, there is nothing sad about it — it is a graduation, not a breakup with the tradition.

Plenty of other couples keep monthsaries going for years, especially in long-distance relationships, where every month genuinely is an achievement, and in cultures where monthsary celebrations are simply part of couple life. The celebrations usually get smaller — a dinner at home instead of a restaurant, a message at midnight instead of a gift — but the ritual of pausing once a month to say I am glad we are still choosing each other never stops being lovely.

A popular middle path: after the first anniversary, keep the big number monthsaries — the 18-month mark, the 100-month dream — and let the ordinary ones become a simple text. If you like round numbers, our post on relationship milestones worth celebrating has a full list to steal from.

You will sometimes hear couples talk about a post monthsary date — it simply means celebrating after the actual date has passed. Exams happened, someone was travelling, the restaurant was booked out, so the monthsary dinner happens three days late. It still counts. The month you completed together does not expire because the calendar was inconvenient.

Is an anniversary every month a real thing, then? In the yearly-anniversary sense, no — anniversary technically means the turning of a year. But that is exactly why the word monthsary exists: a monthly version of the anniversary, with its own name and its own rules. If you want the full comparison, we have a whole post on the difference between a monthsary and an anniversary.

Whichever rules you pick — same date every month, last-day fix, big-numbers-only after year one — the hard part is remembering where you are in the count. Was this month 27 or 28? How many days until the 1000-day mark?

That is exactly what CountingUs is for: it counts your days and months together automatically, so your monthsary never sneaks up on you and your milestones never slip past unnoticed. Set your date once, and every monthsary after that is just the fun part.