We didn’t follow the tradition of sleeping apart the night before the wedding or hiding from each other day-of. The morning of our wedding day I woke up first, the room was calm and the sun was shining in, and Brad was asleep next to me. There was this peaceful anticipation of the day and this feeling of certainty that this was the person I wanted to wake up with every day for the rest of my life. I opened my vows up on my phone and read them to myself, I made some additions inspired by that feeling I had that morning, and took pause to just feel overwhelmingly grateful. It was the best start to the best day. 2. The ceremony felt so intimate and “us” – I loved how comfortable I felt despite so many eyes looking at us. It felt like it was just Brad and I and our JOP! Our JOPs words were really inspiring and captured our relationship and our intentions for the future perfectly. I’ll look back so fondly on it forever! 3. Our first dance – dancing with Brad is always the highlight of my day, any day. He’s such a great dancer and makes me feel like a great dancer just from making it easy to follow his lead. We hadn’t rehearsed any dancing at all, and on the spot we invented this spin move that neither of us feel we could replicate to this day, but it was improvised and seamless in the moment! He’s the most fun to dance with and our first dance was no exception.

 

I think one of my favourite things about our wedding was actually the lack of details! We tossed some costco flowers around the morning-of (having a beautiful setting to start with definitely helped) and had friends re-heat the catering on the BBQ while we all enjoyed some drinks, everyone could help themselves to the drinks of their choice, it felt like a “no pressure” environment – very “us”! I did love having a friend play me down the aisle on the acoustic guitar – I always feel my dad in acoustic guitar music so it was amazing to have that little piece of him with me as I walked the aisle.

 

The summer before my dad died we (coincidentally) had a long talk about marriage and it greatly influenced my philosophy on marriage. Keep in mind, he was a numbers guy with a math degree, and that’s the lens through which he saw much of the world – this isn’t a philosophy for the strictly romantic “one true love” believers: You’ll spend a very short portion of your time on this earth open to finding that forever match to marry. It might be 5, maybe 8 years of your life where you’re ready in terms of maturity and open to settling down with that special someone. To expect to meet the person you feel is the best match for you in the whole world in that brief amount of time, relative to the length of your life, is unrealistic. It is probable that you will find a “better match” over the course of the remainder of your life. So when you marry, you need to marry that person knowing that one day, it’s statistically likely that you will cross paths with a person who you may feel is an even better match for you. And you marry knowing those odds, and knowing that you have made your commitment to this person regardless of those odds, and that you will continue to choose them even in the face of what might seem “better”. Marriage is a promise to that person that you’ll choose them despite all else, even when it’s the harder thing to do. (Obviously with exception of domestic violence or some other good grounds to depart a relationship).

 

Another quote I like is “marriage isn’t a promise to love someone until you don’t anymore”, implying that you need to work at continuing to love each version of that person for the duration of your lives together, rather than calling it quits when the magic fades.