The Next Chapter

I won’t be posting much this week, as I try to take my annual week to reflect on the year, and make lists of goals for the year ahead. Plus, I’m preparing a monster post for you about Project Wedding Dress (yay!) It’s not finished yet, but thus far it’s turning out to be worth all of the pain and heartache involved.

My New Year’s panderings have made me realize just how eventful this year has been. We got engaged, I started this blog, David transferred law schools, I took scads of night-school classes. We’ve been so busy it’s been hard to think, but looking back over the year I’m grateful to all the many joys and the few disappointments. And if this year was big, next year is set to be a whopper of a year – we have piles of things to look forward to with the wedding being the cherry on top.

Setting out goals for this coming year has made me think about coping with the potential let down after the wedding, or post-nuptial depression, if you’re being dramatic. Several of you have emailed me to ask for the practical approach to dealing with life post wedding. I am, of course, wildly unqualified to talk about this subject, but here are my thoughts:

In movies, weddings are always the very last scene – the point the whole story builds up to. life happens, and then if all goes well, you get a wedding. Done. Culturally (and even out here in blog land) we’ve developed something of an obsession with weddings. They are pretty! They are dramatic! They are emotional! They are easy to make fun of! So, it’s not surprising that when a wedding is over, many of us slip into a bit of a depression‌ the party was really fun, and its sure not going to happen again. Now what? I think we need a invitation to re-imagining things. What if we didn’t think of weddings as the End Of The Story And Happy Ever After, but we thought of them as The Very First Chapter Of A Brand New Book? Of late, when people ask me about the wedding, I tend to sigh and say “It can’t come soon enough.” After saying that to a few people, I realized that it might sound like I was excited for the big party, and I wanted it NowNowNow, when in reality I was saying, I was really excited about being married, and I wanted that to begin immediately.

So for 2009, I’m making lists of things that I want as a newlywed. I’m making plans for adventures we will take together, goals that our partnership will help me reach for. I’m making lists of places I’d like for us to travel before we have kids, and career goals that I’d like to get moving on now that I’m wed. The week we return from our honeymoon, David will start his final year of law school, and with so much ahead of us, I hope we won’t be taking too much time to look back.

My wishes for 2009: May we continue to try to live bravely and honestly, and may our wedding be a joyful celebration of who we’ve become together, and how much we have ahead of us.

So, Team Practical:
1. How have you dealt with (or do you plan to deal with) post-wedding let-down? Did you experience it?
2. What non-wedding goals do you have for the year ahead?

(If you haven’t read it already, go read Cate’s amazing post on this subject)

It Happened

I am not ashamed to admit that I’ve read Martha Stewart Weddings since 2006 (I just checked my bookshelf to give you an exact date). Maybe it was being the only girl in my urban-alt-theatre friend circle who actively wanted to get married one day, maybe it was my love of pretty things, I don’t know. But I used to buy them in the subway station, and sneak read them on the train, so when I ran into someone I knew I didn’t have to explain myself (hiding my addiction to Offbeat Bride was simpler). Lots of their weddings were froofy and gag-worthy and I mocked them, but every so often they had a wonderful homemade wedding, and I would sigh and swoon, hoping one day it would be me.

Today, as I was rushing through Rite Aid, I grabbed the new MSW, mostly out of habit. I read it without shame on the bus home (I have an alibi now), and in 10 minutes I was done with it, cold. It was an excellent issue, mind you, same pretty pictures as always, but life moves on. My wedding dress – not in the pages. My bridesmaids dresses – well, no. My colors? Right. No colors. And so. More and more I find that the articles I’m clipping these days are on long happy marriages, tiny babies, places to travel, ways to nest, or just my old standbys of politics and pithy news.

So, to you today, a ray of hope. Our weddings will one day be behind us, and we won’t mind a bit.