One of My Greatest Learning Experiences

This blog was supposed to be about planning my wedding. It was supposed to describe, in detail, the details of my big day. But as with all creative endeavors, sometimes the route you expect to do down isn't always the path you end up taking. Shut up, I know that sounded cliché. But then, clichés are awesome at one thing in particular: making sense of complicated situations and experiences.

My wedding day was not the vision, the fantasy, that I had executed in my mind for a full 14 months prior to June 12, 2010. It didn't play out like I had prepared in my head. Days never do.

I think that's a subject often glossed over in wedding planning. People tend to not put much emphasis on the fact that your wedding day is literally, 1 day. "It's one of the most important days of your life!" folks conclude. Of course. But it's still a God-ordained 24-hour day. If you believe in God. Well shit, even if you don't.

My best advice to new brides is to really consider that. Ponder it. Go through 1 exciting, eventful single day of your life and then, when you're comfy in your bed late at night, think about how quickly that day goes by. It happens in a flash, and then it's over. The vision/fantasy day that you've been living out for a year (or more, or less) inside of your own mind will take up so much more time/thinking/planning/strategy/fuel than the actual day of your wedding. Take that as you may. It's not a bad or good thing, it's just a thing. It's a consideration.

I kind of got off-topic. That's because as a wedding graduate, I feel like I have a lot of things to say. But truth be told, I've been avoiding blogging because I couldn't articulate, even to myself, exactly how I felt about our wedding day.

As you read in my last post, a lot of things didn't go as expected. But believe me when I tell you that marrying Neal, yes, the actual marrying part of the day, was one of the greatest moments of my life thus far. When that ceremony started, an hour and a half late, in a reception hall instead of a garden, the vision I had been playing out in my head for months evaporated and nothing else mattered except the intense love I was sharing with my almost-husband and a room full of the most important people in my life. Surreal, yes. Amazing, yes. Deeply profound. Deeply gratifying.

Sharing vows with Neal was far more intense than I expected it to be. Neither him nor I could stop the tears. The waltz my Dad wrote for us was pure magic, and dancing to it with my husband was supernatural. The day had its moments of stress, and its complementary moments of indescribable beauty. It had drama, and frustration, and all of those real-life weirdnesses that seem to come about only when you plan on one thing and the good Lord takes you in a totally different direction. What we're so unable to do in this life is be fluid to new plans. We spend hours planning for minutes that haven't yet come into existence.

If I were to do it all over again, and trust me, if you've gone through the process of planning a wedding, you will want to do everything all over again in different way - I would do 1 thing and 1 thing only:

Simplify.

Easier said than done, my pretties. But I'm talking, like, major simplification. Dress off the rack. A flower in my hair. A church/reception combo space. A pizza party. Either that, or an elopement in California. Simple.

What's complicated about this wedding thing is that nothing in life is pure black & white. Wedding days aren't all or nothing. They aren't ALL perfect, or ALL tragic. We are trained to focus on flowers, food, organza, and lace when what happens on the day of your wedding is that, you literally don't care about those things. What you really want to do on your wedding day is get married. Once and for all.

It's funny how we spend so many days planning one day, so much time considering all these details when what happens on the day-of that day, is that we forget all the other days we spend planning for this 1 day, and we want nothing more than to just BE. Be with our loved ones, our vows. To hold one another. To be.