Everyone says your wedding day
is the happiest day of your life. Everyone.
When I woke up the morning of
my wedding I was miserable.
The night before, I had stayed
up until probably 1am. We couldn’t get into the church to decorate until
sundown—sundown in July. We had exactly 2 hours to haul in all of the vases, tree
branches, buckets of sand, aisle decorations, serving utensils, and ceremony
pieces; set them all up; and get out. It was a zoo. During
the decorating I made the mistake of racing my best friend Logan across the
church foyer and, of course, I hurt my back somehow.
The weeks before the wedding had
been a ragged race to the finish line. I worked for days to type up binders for
both my sisters with ten pages of instructions and contact information and
diagrams and timelines detailing how, when, and where everything was supposed
to be put together. I spent every minute chasing loose ends: cleaning the
apartment, packing for the honeymoon, finishing the wedding video, finalizing
all the arrangements, picking up 300 ball-point pens…
Like most red-blooded American
girls raised on Disney, I had been looking forward to my wedding since I was
five. It was my chance to have everything exactly the way I had always dreamed.
The day I wore the most incredible shoes of my entire life ought to be my
wedding day. The problem was that meant that I had to find the world’s most incredible shoes (at a price I could afford),
and the most incredible earrings, and the most incredible tiara, and…you get
the picture.
So, for months wedding planning
was my full-time job. I researched everything ad nauseam. I had to look at
EVERY option before making any decision. Since I did a lot of shopping online,
the options frequently numbered in the high hundreds. To find the church I
Google image searched every church in
Lincoln. I created spreadsheets, arranged visits and interviews, wrote a list
of questions to ask, printed a map of the most efficient route to each church, took
notes on whether they allowed outside catering, recorded music, a guest preacher,
etc. And that was just for the church.
I hand-made everything I could.
I spent hours sewing tissue paper leaf garland, harvesting branches, hand-dying
paper, decoupaging vases, drawing the design for the invitations. I made the boutonnieres,
the bridesmaid bouquets, the ring bearer pillow, my own bouquet, the aisle
decorations, the cake-topper, the corsages. My days were spent cutting, hole punching,
sewing, and ribbon-tying. Wedding planning was my life.
So here I was on the morning of
the ceremony after 10 months of preparation, two weeks of scrambling,
a late night of frustration, all with a geyser of stress beneath the
surface and--surprise! I was absolutely and utterly miserable. I stumbled into
the shower and with the noise of the water as a protective sound-barrier, began
to bawl my eyes out. Why?...I honestly had no idea. It didn’t end there either.
Five minutes before I was to walk down the aisle I fainted because I was crying
so hard.
Now imagine that my wedding had
been portrayed in a film. The average viewer would assume, naturally, that since
I was clearly so miserable, the wedding was a huge mistake. Either there was
some lost love whom my heart had not relinquished, or some flaw in my
relationship I had not yet admitted, or some dream that couldn’t be realized
within the confines of marriage. As expected, I would realize this at a
dramatic moment and save myself from a lifetime of regret.
But if that had been my ending,
I would have lost the most incredible years of my life so far. Once all the
wedding rediculosity was behind us, Matt and I went back to just being us—just
being together. He went back to being my best friend and my biggest fan;
helping me be my best self. Wherever he was, there was my home. When we were
together it was like we weren’t two people, we were just one; we knew each other’s
thoughts before we spoke them; we had a common language and innumerable inside
jokes. I respected him. I wanted to be the kind of person he was. He treated me
like a queen even though I would never be able to say I deserved it. He
listened to me and lifted me up. He let me shelter and care for him when he was
down. I would have been lost without him. And every day since then, I have
fallen more in love with him. If I had followed the cliché storyline conclusion,
I would have missed it all.
The key was in something my dad
had said to me that I will never forget. Some while before the wedding, Dad sat
down with Matt and me and told us that if at any point either of us decided that getting married was not the
right thing to do, it was okay. All we had to do was come to him and he would
take care of it. He would handle telling all of the family, all of the guests,
all of the particulars of canceling the wedding. He would even help us tell each
other. He didn't want fear of tangled details to stand in our way. The only thing for us to focus on was whether marriage was the right decision—even to the very
moment we were standing at the altar.
Another bride might have seen
this counsel as her father’s hint that she was making the wrong choice. I
didn’t. From that moment on, I felt genuinely relieved. It wasn’t disapproval;
it was permission: permission to question, permission to examine, permission to
be honest with myself. If on my wedding day I had thought it was too late to
ask whether marrying Matt was the right path to take, it would not have made the
question go away. The question would have lurked in the corner of my mind, a
grey uninvited guest staring me down silently. “Are you sure?” its eyes would
ask, pointing a bony finger at my misery as evidence of the likely answer.
Thanks to my dad, it didn’t
happen that way. When the question arrived I didn’t banish it to a corner; I
invited it in. I gave myself permission to consider it fully, no matter the
conclusion. I looked it in the eye without fear. I did this many times that day.
Every time I asked myself whether marrying Matt was what I really wanted, the
answer was yes. I had spent five years getting to know him, examining my heart,
and getting to know myself. I was sure. And after I revived from my faint, I
married him.
It took me a long time to
figure out exactly why I cried so much that day. I think a great deal of it was
the culmination and release of stress from the year of insanity I put myself through.
Some of it was probably the tiredness. But I think most of it was the silly
fact that I was unhappy that I was unhappy. I woke up expecting magical
wedding-day bliss and when it didn’t come I was deeply disappointed and
confused. Sorry, girls. No matter what they tell you, your wedding day cannot
magically undo sleep deprivation, pulled muscles, a year’s worth of hassle, buckets of anxiety, and a lifetime of inflated expectation. You might not wake up feeling like it is the
happiest day of your life. But thanks to my dad I discovered that the most
miserable day can also turn out to be the best day, or at least the beginning
of the best day, because that is what these last two years have felt like: one
big long best day of my life. And I am so grateful.
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