I’m writing this in lieu of writing my last tranche of thank-you notes. I’ll get to them, I swear…
Sarah and I tied the knot on the 5th of October.
It was at Housing Works Bookstore, which was a nice piece of symmetry for me; Housing Works was the very first place I visited when I moved to New York City. I can’t remember the exact book event I went to, but it was literally the day after I had arrived, still uncertain where I was going to be living or how I was going to make any money. Everything felt so unstable then, but I still knew that this was where I wanted to be, come what may.
That I met a woman as amazing as Sarah and convinced her to spend the rest of our lives together is still wondrous to me. Here we are, three years into our lives together, and nothing feels more comfortable and yet precious and mysterious at the same time than the strength of our relationship.
And there was a crossword puzzle, of course.
The full set of edited photos have just come in, and they’re helping Sarah and I remember what actually happened that evening. It’s a funny thing, but people tell you to just be “in the moment” when you ask them for advice about your own wedding. It’s easy enough to sort of shrug this off as a cliché, but having gone through it now myself, it’s shocking how much of the event you don’t remember — who you talked to, what the music was, exactly what was in your vows…
At a certain point during the evening, I started saying “I’ve run out of unique ways to say ‘thank you’, so, just, thank you.” When we started down the planning road for all of this, a couple of the wedding checklists suggested we come up with a “mission statement”, and as much as that felt like a weird corporate exercise, I was glad we did it. What we came up with:
Our wedding will serve as an outward and visible symbol of our commitment to each other that we want to share and celebrate with our closest friends and family.
Having all of those people we loved there with us truly was the most important part of the night for us.
And we had fun with it.
It’s still a little hard to believe it’s done; we’d been engaged for over a year and I’d finally gotten used to how “fiancée” felt rolling off my tongue; “wife” is probably going to take a little while to feel natural, too. And not spending every weekend prepping logistics means we’ve got a sudden surplus of free time that we’re currently filling with lots of Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
Married life just feels like we’ve gotten back to normal, honestly, having survived the maelstrom (financial, emotional, logistical) of the wedding. Back to our jobs and hobbies and cat.
Just now, we’re doing it together.