So just to clarify I am not due to be wed anytime soon, sorry if I lured you into this post on false pretences. I’m not even sure that getting married is for me, I’ve been asking my married friends for years what made them take the step, with answers including ‘because I love him’, ‘because that’s what you do’ and ‘for tax reasons!’ My favourite response was from a friend many years ago who said she married her husband so that they would be a team filled with love for life.
I love it when I’ve been a guest at a wedding, I love the glamour, the food, the Champagne, the entire day of emotional charge. Wedding days give us all permission to step into love. I cried at the father of the bride speech at a wedding last year and I didn’t even know the bride or groom. (I wasn’t at the wrong wedding, my boyfriend knew the happy couple.)
All the weddings I’ve been to have been so wonderful, and it makes me think if I do end up getting married I would want to create a perfect day. I would hate for it to rain on my wedding day, I really would. Sure I could talk myself into believing it would be fine if it rained, it’d be funny, we’d all bond by taking shelter, the photos would be a lasting reminder that we live in a country proud of it’s unpredictable weather. But the truth of the matter is that I’d only want it to be sunny, and I’d want the food to be perfect and the speeches would have to be funny yet poignant and everyone would definitely have to have an incredible time, it would have to be a perfect wedding day.
But who ever said love was perfect? The lead up to wedding days are often so fraught with stress and anxiety that things won’t go right. But if a wedding day is to reflect the rest of life with another person, making it as hiccup free is far from the roller coaster that is sure to follow. As humans we’re just not wired to be perfect in any area, including love. We’re wired to try stuff, get it wrong, learn from mistakes and then go again having grown from the experience. To experience love we have to be open and vulnerable and real.
If getting married is the starting point for being a team filled with love for life surely the day itself should be an opportunity to be open and vulnerable which means going with the flow if the food is slightly wrong, and feeling relaxed and forgiving if the speeches aren’t perfect, and dancing in the rain.
Hannah, I have so much to say on this subject, I think I might write a blog post on it! I giggled at the idea of you sobbing to the father of the bride’s speech at the wrong wedding – that would have been funny, like something from a film.
I am married, as you know – but I never EVER thought I’d be a wife to someone one day. What I wanted was to live with Nige, but honestly, I don’t think it ever really crossed my mind that we’d get married. I have to say though that the day he asked was such a beautiful experience – his plan, to take me on a long bike ride out to where he and his late father had cycled when he was a child, was scuppered by a foot of snow. Instead, we walked up to Darwen Tower, across the Lancashire Moors with a flask of tea and some sandwiches. I had NO IDEA. We just frolicked and met some lovely people and drank tea and wandered back hours later, frozen but happy.
We walked back through Bold Venture Park, which is one of my favourite parks ever. Saying goodbye to the walkers we had met, we found ourselves in a kiddies’ playground, and he looked at me, said that he loved me, took my face in his hands and asked me to marry him. It was possibly the most surreal moment of my life. I said yes and we ran around the park like children who’ve just met Santa Claus. Then I confessed that I hadn’t actually heard him clearly, because his hands had been over my ears!
Anyway, fast forward 15 months and we were married in Horsham registry office – a gorgeous building. It wasn’t a seamless day – they cut my walking-down-the-aisle song really abruptly, and my nose was running, and Nige said his vows facing the Officiator rather than me. But that, as you wrote, was what was so beautiful about it – that it WAS so imperfect.
Nearly three years into marriage, I am still deeply in love with my husband. I’m used to being an Atkinson now, and for me, marriage is not ‘a piece of paper’. It’s so much more than that. We are intertwined by law as our fingers are, and it has brought me closer to my walls and my fears around intimacy. I love being Nige’s wife and I love him being my husband. I’d do it all over again in a flash, even though the first few months after being married were really hard, actually.
I think the emphasis that goes onto the wedding day can be a beautiful thing to witness and be part of, but it’s important, so so important, to look beyond the Big Day to the Big Life that waits beyond it.
Elloa x