Your Wedding day is NOT your marriage! (Sweetie!)

This is a blog post especially for the ladies out there!

Actually, you know what?  I think weddings SHOULD be celebrated elaborately, with pomp and fanfare. This is to show that you are embarking on something serious, so it is fitting that a wedding should represent the magnitude of this new endeavour and stage in your life.  However, I think that in that, we must never lose sight of the fact that the wedding is about the marriage.  The wedding is not about the wedding!  After being immersed in wedding magazines and planning and initiatives for a while, I can’t help thinking that it is so easy for brides especially to get caught up in planning the magic of the day, as if the wedding is an end in itself, along with all its special touches. Of course it is not.  This is why I think that it is better to focus on your relationship afterwards than on your actual wedding. So, even where it is good and right to have a big day to acknowledge that this is a huge step, it would be better, in my opinion, to have a smaller wedding and to spare more thought for your marriage afterwards.

This is a sobering thought, and I hope this does not come across as being too cynical. If you are at the age (like me) where it seems that all your friends and colleagues are getting married or have already taken that step, and if you have access to the weddings of friends of friends on facebook etc, take a little time to look through the weddings represented in all the pictures. (I would not advise this with your actual friends, it might seem a little weird).

I’m confident that you will find that if not all the pictures, then certainly a full 90% of them reflect beautiful weddings, with gorgeous decorations and clothes and floral arrangements, romantic settings and exquisite food. (There will usually have been wonderful music too, but pictures are not so good at representing that!)
And yet, statistics show that 50% of  ALL  marriages will end in divorce, where based in the UK.  Further statistics show that of the 50% that  remain, a further 50% (or 25% in total) will be very unhappy.  Meaning that 25% will escape divorce and be tolerable.  (Actually, I often think that many marriages needlessly end up in divorce – not because it is inevitable or because the partners are hopelessly incompatible or are bad people – but maybe because of a variety of complex reasons). So then, to go back to these pictures – the beauty of the wedding  or the fact that you had a perfect day does not bear ANY relation to the probability of success of the marriage itself.  Why not resolve that your marriage will not become a statistic, and make up your mind to have a lovely day and an even lovelier marriage?

The way I think about it, thinking ahead to the marriage I hope to have and the wedding that will precede it, is that the marriage is or will be the relationship between us.  The wedding however, is literally the “icing on the cake” (a  completely unavoidable pun – sorry!) – whereas the marriage is the cake itself. So in thinking ahead to the marriage, I hope to be working on the relationship between him and me and building an excellent foundation before the wedding which can be consolidated and built upon once we are actually married.  In that way, we can have a wedding that is as beautiful as we wish, knowing that that will hopefully be an accurate representation of the interaction that we have already built and that we hope to work upon for the rest of our lives.

Bible Verses:
Psalm 45v13-15 (A wedding Psalm)
The royal daughter is all glorious within the palace;
Her clothing is woven with gold.
14 She shall be brought to the King in robes of many colors;
The virgins, her companions who follow her, shall be brought to You.
15 With gladness and rejoicing they shall be brought;
They shall enter the King’s palace.

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PHOTO CREDITS
Photo of wedding cake toppers by Alex Ramos on Pixabay
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