ChickSpeak

The single most asked question you will encounter after your wedding is “So how’s married life?” To which you will respond, “Life is absolutely perfect! We never fight anymore, all of our financial troubles have been solved, in fact all of our problems period, have just vanished. It’s absolute bliss!” 

(insert record scraping sound here)  NOT!

The truth is your wedding day is just that, a day. Afterwards nothing has really changed except you have a new ring and in some cases a new last name. Life goes on the same way it did before. Of course looking at my shiny new wedding band and calling Will my husband was amazing, but in reality I woke up the following Monday morning in a sort of panic.

I had what has commonly been called, the “wedding blues.” You spend an entire year or in my case a year and a half of your life planning for one single day or weekend that flies by so fast you are left wondering if the whole thing was a dream. I began scrutinizing every detail, being super critical of what the photographer did or didn’t capture, worrying that not enough people had stayed for the reception due to the bad weather, asking myself what I had missed by not being able to have an outdoor ceremony, worrying that I didn’t feel like Will and I had connected during the event and maybe even felt a little distant. Shouldn’t I be on cloud nine? Where are the wedding bells and cheers from the crowd? Why don’t I feel any different?!

I talked to Will and asked for a weekend with just the two of us to reflect. I talked to my Mom, my sister and my Aunt about every second of the weekend and things that people had said to them about the wedding. I painstakingly reviewed our pictures with friends and coworkers analyzing them to the nth degree. I even e-mailed my photographer about my concerns.

On the brink of going crazy, not to mention my loved ones growing impatience and apathy, I received my wedding video. I sat alone in our house and watched it from start to finish.  I laughed. I cried. I laughed again. And finally our wedding came into focus for me. Being able to see the entire event from another perspective and seeing the emotion that I didn’t even know I had had made me realize that whether the wedding turned out perfect to my plan or not, it was in fact perfect, and I was “just as married” (my father’s words) to Will regardless of it all.

I slowly started to accept that wedding was over but my marriage was just beginning and that is really the exciting part after all. Why should a wedding make me feel different? In my heart I had always known Will was my soulmate. A ring on my finger doesn’t change the fact that when I agreed to marry him I had committed my life to him. In some sense the wedding was simply a formality.

I finally relaxed and just enjoyed being Will’s wife. When talking to people I stumbled over “my husband does this…” and “my husband likes that…” and laughed inside because I was so happy to finally be able to call him my husband. I changed my last name on everything that I could (with the exception of the official documents due to the delayed honeymoon) and for the first time ever thought of us as a family. 

No more reason to feel awkward sleeping in the same bed at our parent’s house, no need to justify how what is happening in Will’s life applies to mine, no reason to avoid topics about our life at home because we are not just living together anymore, we are no longer boyfriend and girlfriend, we are husband and wife. It’s strange and amazing to see the power that those titles have.

The wedding seems like it was a million years ago although it’s only been three and a half months. It holds a warm and dear place in my heart, but it was only a day after all and there have been so many days since and so many more to come that my focus has turned towards our marriage and making it the best it can be, full of love, compromise and growth.