confessions of a wedding-aholic

I have a confession to make. I’m a wedding-aholic. I can’t get enough of them. And now that my own is fading into the past, it’s really starting to look quite sad.

I wasn’t always a wedding-aholic. In fact, for many many years I was anti-weddings. I’ve never been anti-marriage, but the whole ‘wedding’ thing freaked me out. After all, you don’t need a piece of paper to be committed to the one you love, to let them know you want to spend the rest of your life with them. Commitment is something you choose within your relationship EVERY DAY. All I knew about weddings was ‘white fluff’ – all that whiteness and frou-frou and sparkles and expensive useless tat. NOT my scene!

But inexplicably I changed my mind. I can’t pinpoint when the change in attitude began, but I know that I slowly came to realise that it doesn’t have to be a big white fluffy deal. And no, you don’t HAVE to get married to be committed. I began to see it as a way of celebrating your love and commitment with family and friends. This is the person you love and want to spend the rest of your life with, what’s not worth celebrating about that? It's about publicly declaring to your family and your friends that you have chosen each other, you are going to be with your partner through thick and thin, that you are prepared to make sacrifices for each other and are in it for the long haul. That you love this person so much that you are willing to go ahead and 'forsake' all others and put up with their annoying stuff and that you think they are special. Marriage is our society’s way of recognising a couple has chosen to spend the rest of their lives together. And though I’m not one to embrace social norms just because they are... well... social norms, I realised that there’s nothing wrong with that. Did we HAVE to get married? No. We wanted to.

We forewent a lot of traditional wedding fare along the way. Neither of us is traditional or religious anyway, and with so many wedding customs centred around patriarchal notions of women being property to be owned, we wanted to make sure that everything we did was because we wanted it there and knew the meaning of it.

Along the way I made a heap of bride-to-be buddies in a forum, and I learned that even though I was a bit of a bridal scrooge, everyone’s dreams and ideals were different. It really opened my eyes. And I slowly stopped being so judgemental about all the white fluff. These traditions are a big deal to some people, and I began to understand that to each their own. I am still a big advocate of understanding what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, but if it’s what you BOTH want (and that’s the important bit, it’s a marriage after all, a partnership, there are two of you getting married here!), then go for it.

And along the way, a little bit of white fluff rubbed off on me. I would never go for a lot of that kind of stuff for myself, but I appreciate its beauty and allure for other people (well, other brides anyway, I’m not so sure about the grooms...). Now that it’s all over, I miss the joy and creativity it brought me.

But I also realise that now that the wedding is over, the marriage is what’s left. And that’s the most important – and best – bit! It was never about the wedding, but about the marriage. We publicly declared to our loved ones that we had found each other and would never let each other go, and we celebrated that with them (we had an after-party rather than a reception!), and now we LIVE it every day.

I’ll just have to get my wedding fixes elsewhere!