This Saturday I will be celebrated my 17th wedding anniversary and coincidently will be attending a friend's wedding the night before. This brings up all of my feelings on "weddings". The longer I am married the more I believe we should wait to have our wedding until after we are married. Obviously I am being a little funny. But I think it takes awhile to realize what your wedding really means and appreciate what it entails. But when you are all entangled in the wedding planning and the excitement of it all you don't realize the marriage part until down the road. Don't assume you know what I mean. I mean that as a good thing. Until you are truly married you don't realize the importance of your vows and promises to each other. What they actually mean and what you both meant by them. Also the amount of work and emotional tolls that it can take on both of you. When you actually made them at the beginning did you really understand the deepness of them?
I sometimes ask my husband if we could renew our vows. He always says has his stock answer. "Why, we didn't break them?" He may be right, but I feel if we did it over again, it would be new vows and new promises. Knowing what we know now and knowing our committment to each other and our family, the words would be different. Knowing everything we have been through and came through the other side. I know I would say different things and appreciate it the same from my husband. We make sure every year on our anniversary we take the time to be together whether being on vacation or just doing something just the two of us to remember what we are to each other and really celebrate us, the us we have become over the years.
There are studies that say that most engaged couples only plan for their actual wedding day and not for after. Not necessarily financially or anything like that, but emotionally. Even if you have lived together before you got married it is still different after making promises to each other and knowing you are in this together and you made a vow to work through everything together...the good and the bad. So weddings are great fun, beautiful ceremony and beautiful words. But just remember after your wedding whether one year later or twenty years later...keep your committment to the words you said before but also use new and different words for your new and different relationship that develops over time. You will both change, grow and maybe even find yourselves. The key is to do it together and still WANT to do it together. I look back on my wedding and realize how young I was and how much I really didn't know. But I did know this...I meant what I said and I took it seriously. Even when it was so hard and I didn't know if I could. But making it this far down that road and seeing how far we have come I can also see how much is ahead of us. So I still feel that my husband and I are going down the rest of the road together, committed and ready for the future......just like on our wedding day!!
