Today's post is somewhere between a wedding graduate post and a Reclaiming Wife post. Because while Marty (who blogs at Not The Marrying Kind) does talk about their wedding, she also talks about how marriage has been hard, and their love just keeps on growing. Which is a beautiful echo of Drea, the Chicago-ian who's wedding graduate post helped lead them to their wedding venue, and her story of the love that just keeps growing, even during the hard times. So with that, a wedding full of people grinning their faces off, and truth.
Planning our wedding was one of the hardest things I've done in my life...and not because we were planning a wedding. A.P. and I were engaged at the end of August 2009 and married at the end of March 2010. During that time, I started a new job (my first year in a new career), my brother was in the hospital, my mother had surgery, A.P.'s mother passed away unexpectedly, my sister announced she was moving to India, A.P.'s father had an unexpected heart surgery, A.P. (quietly) turned 30, and then right before the wedding, A.P. lost his job. That's seven months of insanity, five of which were spent also planning our wedding. It seemed that anything and everything that could go wrong and cause us a ton of additional stress did go wrong.
Some people might take all of these terrible things happening as a sign that marriage wasn't the right path. By the time A.P. lost his job, I decided that these things just served as proof that we could handle the hard stuff, and that we could handle it together. I wish I could tell you that I learned to fight the good fight, or that planning a wedding was pure bliss, but we didn't and it wasn't. It was five months of hell. But I did learn what I can rely on my now husband for, and what I have to do myself. I learned that while we may not have always gotten what we wanted in our relationship, we usually always got what we needed. And I also learned that we can weather serious storms, like the death of A.P.'s mother, which has changed him in profound ways I can't really describe.
Being married is still a bit of a learning experience. After we married, we had about three weeks of good, happy, stress-free times, before I lost my job due to layoffs. I was devastated. The worst part was that I had to continue working at the company for an additional month if I wanted severance and then unemployment. I was broke after paying for a wedding with A.P., and now I was about to become unemployed. I went into a deep depression. And while financially, we would survive (A.P. found another job pretty quickly, which was extremely fortunate), my depression drastically affected our marriage. We fought all the time, we weren't talking to each other, and we were both pretty miserable. I've since found a job, but that terrible period we were in hasn't completely faded yet. The stress of our new jobs has also affected our marriage. We are both working every night after work, and usually one day on the weekend. It's hard. We have very little time for each other, but we're, as I like to say, "in it to win it." I wrote about how our learning curve has been pretty steep in our first year of marriage, but that perhaps that's a good thing. It gets better every day, but it takes work on both our parts.
Oh and I also learned how to throw a kick*ss wedding. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Marty & A.P.
