What is it like being married? It’s like two satellites passing one another in orbit. Maybe that sounds depressing and lonely but it’s not. It’s deliciously predictable. It’s cozy but wondrous. You’re floating alone in your capsule, but with regular company, and you still have a pretty nice view of the universe when you bother to look outside the window.
We have now been married for, as the title suggests (thanks, title!), more than eight years. During the run-up to Our Big Day, in wedding industry speak, I was like: thank Missy Elliot this dude is cool, because if he was uncool I would be in some serious trouble here. He not only had opinions about our wedding, he knew our to-do list items and — this is the really key thing here — he acted on them. I wasn’t the Wedding Captain, barking out orders. We were both standing at the wheel, steering the wedding boat together. Not in a gross romantic way, but in a valiant way. We were Wedding Vikings and we were fixing to conquer some seating charts and song playlists! Just as soon as we pillaged this village.
(Sorry about that, village.)
I didn’t realize this at the time, but it would be a solid indicator of how we would tackle other Big Things down the road. Like moving to a different state, buying a house, renovating a house, having a baby, and then having like a whole other baby. FOR EXAMPLE. All of those things are pretty giant, stressful black holes, but we were, uh, steering the black holes together. Shit, that metaphor didn’t work. You can’t mix boat captaining and black holes, it turns out. Just forget I even mentioned anything about it.
What I’m trying to say is that I thought wedding planning was stressful, and it truly was, but then these other Life Things happened that felt like getting turned upside down and shaken until all the stuff came tumbling out of our pockets. And I’ve been glad, in hindsight, to have been through it all with someone I could count on to show up from T-1000 days before that one Big Day. Even if I don’t always bother to even offer a halfhearted wave through the window at his satellite as it silently passes mine in deep space (and I truly don’t; the realities of parenting make it difficult to use my hands sometimes, also I have jerk tendencies).
And this isn’t to say that having had a solid, reliable partner in crime has made it all easy. We’ve had our share of screaming and sniping and storming off (oh my god, especially over house projects; there is nothing that really gets the old adrenal medulla firing like trying to tile a fireplace with your S/O. But looking back, I can see that our way of working through the wedding together was a solid tell on how we worked through all the other stuff, too.
The phrase “emotional labor” is a relatively new one, but it’s a very important one. Ladies, dudes, all people, don’t get with someone who doesn’t notice the things that need to be done. This can get messy even for the most well-meaning, on-the-same-equality-page couples; and to that end the beau and I continue, even to this day, to periodically argue about who’s showing up more for which tasks and whether that is fine or not (spoiler alert, it is usually just fine for the person not doing the task, funny how that works!). But the overarching point is that if your person is always ignoring the shit, or standing around waiting to be told to do the shit, or moving to another room to better ignore the shit you’re doing, run. You can’t do life’s BS by yourself, and you shouldn’t have to.
Why did I come back after eight years to tell you something you already know? I guess to offer some encouragement to the dozen or so people who stop by here every month looking for ceremony script ideas or wine cork inspo. Weddings — at least the planning of them — actually suck, they really, really do. You, dear wedding-planner, are probably having a really hard time imagining yourself doing anything other than planning a wedding for probably the rest of eternity, like you’ve slipped into some kind of party purgatory. But it will be over soon and then… the real work will begin.
It’s not easy doing life alone. It’s not easy doing life with someone else. And it’s definitely not easy doing life with children. It’s not easy doing life, period.
So take it easy on yourself, kids. And make sure to take some time to gaze out the window once in a while.
