What Is a Wedding?

I planned for months, I documented a hundred different flower options and picked the best one, I crafted like a loon and did marriage preperation. I was a very practical bride, a very conscious bride, I spend money in ways that felt good for my soul and I made things. A lot of things. I tried not to get mad at anyone. I never expected perfection, I had been told it wasn’t attainable. I read everyone’s blog and was expecting post wedding let down. None of this prepared me for the wedding.

Our wedding was perfect. Everyone told me something would go wrong but it didn’t. Everyone looked gorgeous (if, in the case of the bride, a bit cherubic), there was plenty to drink, my brother’s band played and my uncle danced around like a lunatic in his kilt. There were moments that felt like magic; my sisters and friends and David and his friends and me all in with our arms around each other swaying to Sufjan Steven’s Decatur. But it also felt like a tearing, a ripping. Our wedding and the reception felt raw, and wrenched and exacty like you might have thought becoming a new person would feel. Like scenes of poor Dr. Jekyll being pulled into Mr. Hyde, like the Hulk transforming, like growing a second head or teething. I felt like I had been hit by a bus. I cried during my dad’s speech because I was sad, devastated and sad. I also literally jumped for joy and giggled at people but the wedding felt weird and scary. At the hotel that night, I cried myself to sleep. I adore marriage, adore David, adore our baby family. The wedding though, that’s something different.

I have suspected since the wedding that David and I are the only people who felt the way we did. What a wedding means to me, what my wedding meant to me, was a safe space to start this really big change. It was scary and jarring and really intense but we had all the people we loved the most around us. My sisters and cousins and best friends drank and sang and gave me the hugest hugs and everyone was sweet and kind and the room was beautiful and the food was good and the sweet and sour mix David and I stayed up until 1 am making the week before our wedding was worth every drop of delish. And my mummie looked gorgeous and David was handsome (and if you are going to yoke yourself beside someone else forever you want them to be handsome at the moment of yoking). For me, a wedding is a lovely space of happiness with wonderful people in which do to start a marriage, which is not always easy, not always simple, and sometimes is a bit scary. A drink or two never hurt either.