for kerryn and tracey
j’s known you both forever, but i am still amazed at how quickly you’ve become so important in my life. it meant the world to me to have you at our wedding – because even if my immediate family couldn’t make it, my “other” family was there. and i would give anything to be able to be there to witness your happiness today.
it shouldn’t be such a big deal, because, as you’ll soon learn, in the grand scheme of a marriage, a wedding is really just another day – it’s just verbally cementing everything you already know in your heart to be true. everything you already knew the first time you realised you were in love, or that you didn’t want to live your lives without each other. those were far more important days than today. a wedding day can’t possibly reflect everything that makes a relationship real, and the million different ways you already reaffirm that, day in and day out. it can’t possibly demonstrate the same kind of commitment that happens every morning you wake up next to each other and decide to try to be good to one another, to work through the differences during each day, and to end every evening kissing goodnight – that’s far more important than any silly ceremony. it’s an inevitably ineffectual attempt to put to words all the small things that make a couple who they are together which makes them better people than they are individually, a feeble try at quantifying the certainty of a future, a paltry effort to describe the emotions which run deeper than any language. it’s a fancy way to try to announce to the world that all your love and dreams and hopes are wrapped up in the other person, and that you put your whole soul into that investment. and somehow expecting the words “i do” to encapsulate all that.
when you’re already sure of all of everything else, then a wedding is just another day. it shouldn’t matter because it really changes nothing… yet somehow it changes everything.
and it sure as hell is fun.
happy wedding day.
with all my loving wishes for a lifetime of happily ever after,
jen
