Wedding Graduates Return

Mar 2012

Today's post is written by Aly. If you've been hanging around the wedding corner of the web for a while, you'll remember their wedding (I posted some inspiration pictures in my second month of blogging), and that pictures of Aly on her wedding day freed me from worrying that I was making un-feminist choices on mine. Aly also helped me figure out that a family is what you create. So I owe her. Turns out, she recently started a blog, Embrace Release, and after you read this post you need to go read EVERYTHING ON IT, and then join me in begging her to write a book. It's that good.

The APW staff was joking that we should call today's post, "Brought to you by Therapy. Consider it." Because I'm on the record about being pro pre-marital counseling, but I'm pro marital therapy too. The New York Times ran an article this weekend about couples counseling, and they cited a statistic that most couples are unhappy for an average of six years before they seek help. This is a lot like hobbling around on a broken leg without getting it set; the earlier you go in, the cleaner and easier things will heal. Beyond that, this post arguably says everything that needs to be said about how we talk to each other about relationships and what we don't say about divorce. So without further ado, Aly:

I was in the first grade the first time I heard about divorce. My friend Heather’s parents were headed for it. Frowning, my mother explained what that meant. I remember hearing with wonder about how Heather’s parents would live in separate houses and she would go back and forth between them. My own parents were much more unhappy than Heather’s parents had ever seemed to me. Oh how I wished my parents would divorce!

Now I’m married (illegal as it may be) with kids. We have none of the fighting and philandering that defined my parents' marriage, but we’ve had our problems. Three months after our first baby was born, we came within inches of divorce. I recently shared this information with a friend who is struggling in his marriage, and he was stunned. Up to that moment, we had represented “shining beacons of trouble-free couplehood” to him. (His actual words.) Just hearing about how close we came to ending it all, and that we made it back from the abyss, made a big difference in his perspective on his own relationship.

In our culture, most weddings are stressful but joyous events where friends and relations gather to kick-off the marriage of two hopeful people. When all the cake is eaten and the last drunk, sweaty guest is pulled from the dance floor, the happy couple is wished well and sent forth. Alone. They might be given some vague instructions like “never go to bed angry” or “marriage takes work” but mostly well-wishers only smile and hug them and say “Good luck!” (while making mental predictions about how long this will last). Our wedding, gay as it may have been, was no different. For some people, this works out fine. They’ve either had good marriage role models or they’re magical creatures who’ve managed to intuit and enact healthy relationship models in the face of an omnipresent parade of nightmarish examples.

For others, things fall apart when they hit the first or second or fifth major bump in the relationship road. My partner and I had some issues from the beginning, mostly communication-related, that caused a poisonous build-up of resentment and slow erosion of trust over a five year time span. I’m an emotional, talk-it-to-death kind of person, given to blubbering. My partner is far more reserved, stoic nearly, given to holding it all in. You can imagine how well this worked for us. After bumbling through a difficult and expensive journey of trying to conceive, we were thrilled to welcome our first son. My partner was mired in a PhD program, though, and I had my own business that required me to work seven days a week. We were cranky, bewildered parent ships passing in the lonesome, desolate night for months.

That’s really not even the half of it but I’m not one to publish the particulars of our marriage meltdown on the internet. Suffice it to say that:

Things
fell
apart.

For me, the situation was made worse by this new, brilliant kind of love that I felt for our son. Whereas my love for my partner was entangled in and half-choked by our issues and past wrongs, my love for my son seemed to course visibly in the electric air between us, pure and robust and incomparable. Sure, he kept me awake night after night and repeatedly threw up into my hair, but my heart pounded, my brain shut up, and birds burst into song whenever I gazed at him. Which was a lot like how I felt when I first met my partner. Which made me wonder if it shouldn’t still be like that with my partner. And if it should be but wasn’t like that, then maybe we weren’t “meant for each other,” and I wasn’t about to do what my parents did by wasting my life and raising my kids in a doomed, miserable marriage!

No, thank you. Continue reading Secrets Of A Gay Marriage

Posted in: LGBTQ Weddings, Reclaiming Wife, The Day Itself, Wedding Graduates Return | 119 Comments »

Feb 2012

Wedding Graduates Return: Morgan and David

I'm not going to lie to you. Today's post makes me cry every time I read it. Morgan has been around APW a long time. She was the first person brave enough to write about getting married right after a parent's death, and her joke with me is that she basically OWNS the hard stuff chapter of the APW Book. So it was important for her to come back and write this piece about how after surviving the unimaginable, she and her husband David have somehow fought their way through to happiness. Morgan was the inspiration for all the posts about what happens on the other side of the really really hard parts this week, and I'm so honored to share her story with you.

The year before the wedding was so hard that it only makes sense that everything since has felt so easy. My dad was diagnosed with—then died of—cancer, David was unemployed for eight months, my mother was challenging, my cousin died two weeks after the wedding, and my already stressful yet boring job became almost comically awful. (I’d tell you about it, but for that HR gag order…) How could all that has followed not have been easier?

The hard stuff got better. The grief over my dad has leveled to a dull ache with moments of raw grief. David switched to a similar job in his industry with a stable company for a substantial raise. My mother turned sixty, calmed down, lost thirty pounds and found new happiness. She is so much less negative now and it’s proof, I guess, that sometimes people do change and that I was right to distance myself from her but not to close my heart. She’s still who she is and critical, but she’s not mean anymore, and that’s more than I could have hoped for two years ago.

I left my terrible job for a lateral-on-paper move within the company that’s been excellent for me, and I have just been promoted from admin assistant to engineering technician. I left my twenties behind with a surprise birthday party planned by my husband and best friend that involved party hats and goody bags and I couldn’t be happier to be thirty.

When I think back over the last year and half, I’m flooded with so many happy memories. Eating decadent Pierre Hermes treats in a park in Paris, going to a hockey game in Prague, curling up on our fancy leather couch in the basement to watch movies, and handing David a pregnancy test with good news. There have been so many happy things—days, trips, and special moments.

In my mind, the last twenty-three months have been a breeze. But the real world is more complicated, of course. I had bleeding blisters on my feet from all the walking in Paris—at the very beginning of a three and a half week wander around Europe, so I ended up limping across the Continent. We hated Prague so much that whenever we have to do something we don’t want to do, one of us turns to the other and says, “At least we’re not in fucking Prague” and then we fist bump. The basement flooded in May and insurance in Canada doesn’t cover “seepage,” so we had to do a five figure renovation without warning. Because it was all out of pocket, we couldn’t really afford to pay anyone and did 90% of the work ourselves. All while I was in the middle of first trimester exhaustion. Even the baby news wasn’t wholly uncomplicated. I had an early miscarriage a few months before this pregnancy and so we spent the first trimester waiting for something to go wrong. I don’t think I fully believed that it was happening until we had the first ultrasound at 13 weeks and saw little Skipper flailing away (nicknamed after the Madagascar commando penguin). I’m still having trouble processing the fact that we’ve like, created human life and that in March, we’ll bring home a person. Continue reading Wedding Graduates Return: Morgan and David

Posted in: Wedding Graduates Return | 58 Comments »

Feb 2012

Wedding Graduates Return: Nancy & Sean

I've been waiting for today's post for almost two years. No joke. Nancy and Sean got married right after Nancy was diagnosed with breast cancer. She wrote about their heart-wrenchingly beautiful small and simple wedding, and Nancy predicted a happy ending. Now Nancy is back (and her hair has even grown back, into an adorable pixie). She's sharing all the lessons she learned about marriage while surviving breast cancer. And we're all totally allowed to cheat and learn from them. Also, we're totally allowed to pour ourselves a mimosa, and cheer Nancy, Sean, survival, and joy! CHEERS! CHEERS! CHEERS!

Hello APW! Sean and Nancy here, reporting from 1.75 years of marriage. Man, our wedding was awesome. It still chokes me up to this day. And so does our marriage. I feel so damn lucky to have Sean. More and more I think that we were made for each other, and I’m so happy to spend the rest of my life with him.

Now, we cheated a bit. Breast cancer defined much of our engagement and much of the last 1.75 years. Having cancer, for me, was like getting hit by a truck. Physically, it hurt, but it was also an emotional punch that made us think a lot about what is important and how we want to live the rest of our (hopefully long, long) lives.

So, with retrospect, here’s what I’ve learned since we got married:

Sean is number one. This is hard, because I am selfish. But he’s my husband and I know that he has to be the number one priority in my life. This is not only because of the guilt for all the things (sometimes pretty gross things) he did for me during my cancer treatments, but also because I love him and I want to show him that. I also think this sort of idea is at the heart of a good marriage. Like I joke with my friends, I think marriage is about saying you’re wrong when you know you are right.

But more, our marriage is about just two people: us. So, we have to prioritize our relationship and protect it from everyone and everything else. This means that we’ve made a pact not to disparage our spouse in front of others. That eliminates some of our easiest humor, but it makes sure that the other doesn’t feel bad. We try to put the other’s needs first and make them feel good. We try to make each other better too—to eat right and exercise, etc. (That’s my second life lesson: prioritize your health over everything else, 'cause if you don’t have that, you’ll miss everything else.)

It’s cool, I think, that our wedding reflected this idea. That day was just ours. It was super-small and immediate-family-only, so we really just hung out with each other, and didn’t have to spend the whole time talking to relatives we never see or our parents' friends. Also, we didn’t go into massive debt trying to throw a party for other people. That’s nice. If you’re engaged and thinking for ten seconds about a small wedding—I say do it. Down with the WIC and everyone who makes you think that napkins and your special cocktail are more important than your future spouse, cause they aren’t. I do wish we could have thrown a low-key party for our friends on our first anniversary like we wanted to, but we’re still saving up for that.

Continue reading Wedding Graduates Return: Nancy & Sean

Posted in: The Hard Stuff, Wedding Graduates Return | 34 Comments »

Feb 2012

Wedding Graduates: Dianne & Chuck

*Dianne Callahan, Deputy Executive Director, The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society a.k.a. Fundraiser & Chuck Callahan, Sr. Systems Analyst, US Defense Media Center a.k.a. Nerd*

Today's post is profoundly overwhelming in an Everyone Has To Read This way, and also in a Not At All Safe For Work You Will Be Bawling At Your Desk way. But for me, it's way more special than that. Dianne has been reading APW since the very beginning, and in my fourth month of blogging, I wrote about her $10,000 wedding in reverse, where she worked to raise $10,000 for Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s (LLS) Light The Night Walk. But it's more than that. At the LA book tour stop, which was my true hometown stop (more on that tomorrow), I started by saying that I'd founded APW because nothing I saw in wedding media bore any resemblance to the backyard weddings that happened where I grew up. And Dianne lives just a few blocks away from the house where I spent the first twenty-two years of my life. So, I'm proud to bring you a wedding from my hometown and from a woman I deeply respect. Now, I'm sure you'll all join me with a love intervention for Dianne and Chuck, and you will send them your good wishes and/or prayers. I hope this makes all of us think about what our marriages really mean.

Last September, my amazing husband, Chuck, and I celebrated our third anniversary. Actually, we put off celebrating it until November, which is our tradition. We put off our anniversary celebration each year because we chose to combine our 2008 wedding with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s (LLS) Light The Night Walk, and since I’ve been working for LLS for almost three years now and am in charge of the Light The Night campaign, our anniversary falls in my busiest time. So Chuck helps me by serving as one of our lead volunteers for the event so we can raise lots of money for this precious mission, and we wait a couple of months to celebrate our precious anniversary. Except for this year. This year, instead of getting away for a sweet weekend together, we were getting the news that my aggressive cancer had returned and once again I would have to fight for my life.

Which brings me to “…in sickness and in health…” You need to know that Chuck knew what he was getting into when he said those words during our traditional wedding vows. You see, Chuck actually proposed to me in a hospital room the night we found out that I had an aggressive form of stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma. We had only been dating three months. That night, I told him he should run, that he deserved to be with someone healthy, someone who wasn’t going to lose her hair and maybe her life. His response? “When God gives you a gift, you don’t give it back.” He told me he was not going to run and that he already knew that he wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, however long that might be. He said he didn’t ever want me to worry that he would leave my side through whatever we faced. He asked me to marry him that night, knowing that my cancer was incurable and would, undoubtedly, come back.

I suppose it is natural that the thing I remember most about our wedding is standing beneath the tree in our backyard in front of our family and closest friends as Chuck and I repeated those age-old vows. Promises to love and honor one another in good times and in bad, in richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. The promises my parents made to each other that carried them through almost sixty years of marriage before my dad’s death just six months before our wedding. Promises that even today seem to echo back to us from all of the couples who went before us into this sacrament called marriage.

There were many things about our wedding (the second for each of us) that were not traditional that I loved. I wore an aqua dress and a white flower in my hair (that had grown out to almost 3 inches!). We greeted and mingled with our guests before the ceremony. We walked together down the aisle as my sister sang “When You Wish Upon A Star” (the music for the recessional was from Disneyland’s Main Street Electrical Parade). Our attendants were Chuck’s son and daughter—my dream of being a mom answered at last! Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Dianne & Chuck

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife, The Hard Stuff, Wedding Graduates, Wedding Graduates Return | 34 Comments »

Jan 2012

Wedding Graduates Return: Nicole

We're starting the year with posts on marriage from readers who started reading APW when I started writing it, and who have been growing right along side me and the site. Nicole was part of the first week of wedding graduates (back when it was an every-now-and-then kind of project), and she wrote about how her wedding was still crazy joyful, even with a wrecked wedding cake. Now she's back, with her adorable baby girl, talking about how the lessons she learned in wedding planning have continued to matter every day of their marriage. So for all of you newly engaged ladies: What you're doing right now is valuable and important. Cheers!

Now that I’m a mom (What? That still feels weird to say), I read a lot about parenting. I take a research approach: learning about the different ideas out there, gleaning a few things here and there that work for us, filing away little things that might be helpful now or later. You know, I try to be practical about the whole thing.

One of the parenting philosophies that has resonated with me has to do with creating a secure base for a child. The theory goes that if you create a nurturing, loving, secure home base for your child, he or she will be more free to explore and spread his/her wings as a confident independent little person, knowing they can always return to you for security and reassurance when needed.

The idea applies to marriages as much as it does to babies. It wasn’t intentional, but that’s exactly what Patrick and I have created for ourselves—a home base of support.

In the three years since our wedding day, we’ve moved back to our hometown, finished a degree, lost jobs, gotten new jobs, bought a house, had unexpected cuts in income, marked two 30th birthdays, celebrated joys, lost loved ones, and welcomed a daughter into our family. Planning a wedding taught us a lot about how we approach decisions big and small, and we use those lessons all the time. Those months of making lists, talking to vendors and deciding what was important to us taught us about when to rely on our guts, when to run the numbers, when to splurge, when to be thrifty, and when to talk it out.

Continue reading Wedding Graduates Return: Nicole

Posted in: Wedding Graduates Return | 16 Comments »

Jan 2012

Wedding Graduates Return: Marchelle & Three Years of Joy

How to start a new year, here at APW? How to start 2012 with many of you (if all is as it ever is) newly engaged after a season of lights? I thought we'd start with a post from my dear friend Marchelle, who is celebrating the third anniversary of her wedding exactly today. Her post is about why her wedding day mattered. Hopefully it will give those of you just starting down the path of wedding planning an understanding of why you're doing it. As a no-longer newlywed, it gave me a sharp reminder of why my marriage matters. As Marchelle so eloquently says in this post, "Begin as you mean to go on." And so we shall, on this first day of APW for 2012. So we shall.

I write this post from deep in the middle of the hardest time we have so far been through in our marriage. That may seem an odd time to choose to reflect on how our wedding might have shaped our marriage, and an unlikely position from which to reassure those newly considering the prospect of tying their lives together, but hear me out, because it’s not. I have never been more grateful for our marriage, and by extension, our wedding, than in the last year, so the timing feels ideal.

Our primary wedding day was a tidal wave of joy. It lifted us up to heights of emotional experience that I had not previously encountered, carried us along on the shoulders of our dear ones who had gathered with us from all around the world to show their support for our union, and left us washed up on the shores of married life, intangibly but inexorably changed. I am not a religious person, but our wedding ceremony was definitely a spiritual experience—we were blessed by the sheer overwhelming force of love surrounding us that day in a way that we had not, could not have expected. I know that a wedding does not feel this way for everyone, and why should it—our weddings are surely as individual as ourselves—but I am a sensitive person, and that state of rapture which marked the beginning of our marriage has served as a welcome template for countering distress on the most ordinary of our days since.

Popular wisdom tells us that the first year of marriage is the hardest. Based on our experience of the last three years, I beg to differ. Our first year of married life was magical. The first few months were a long, slow comedown from the transcendental high of our wedding day, and the rest an extended honeymoon in which we played at this novel game of being husband and wife. All felt new, all was delightful, still bathed in the afterglow of the intense emotion radiating out from the day on which it began.

Year number two felt rather different, as we bedded down into the mundane but gritty reality of our marriage. It was a year in which big decisions were made and future plans laid involving careers, joint finances and expanding our family. It certainly had challenges of its own, including moving house, and parental illness, but also felt full of possibility—the same possibility bred and realised on our wedding day. As we made our plans and coped with the derailments of those that life occasionally threw at us, I came to more fully understand that within this marriage, as on our wedding day, we can make anything happen. No small revelation, that one.

But it was this year that I really gained an appreciation for the saying, ‘begin as you mean to go on’ as it applied to our marriage, and became truly thankful for those no less distant feelings of bliss that could be called upon to lift me up again when life was seriously hammering me down.

Continue reading Wedding Graduates Return: Marchelle & Three Years of Joy

Posted in: The Hard Stuff, Wedding Graduates Return | 43 Comments »

Wedding Graduates Return

Friends