A Collection Of Thoughts - Six Days To Go

Here I am, six days away from being locked into holy matrimony with my very best friend - you would think that, more than anything, I'd be a mess of excitement, nervousness, and anxiety about the upcoming nuptials. This is what I've been led to believe, anyway, through love songs and televisions series, and the various people peppering me with questions about the wedding and my emotional state upon approach.

The reality tends to be something less than expected (by myself, any ways); it's exhaustion (both physical - from burning the candle at both ends with planning and preparation and allergies, and mental - the stamina required to do wedding planning in nearly all of my down time for the past several months is incredible, and I'm about running on fumes at this point), anxiety (not about the wedding, but about moving out of my childhood home), childish anger, incompletion, and resentment toward partners from past relationships (one in particular), and a very deep seated calm (as if I am doing exactly what I were placed on this planet to do).

There are moments of excitement, some moments of nervousness (closer to a doubt, really), some rare moments of all of the above... and mostly, a forward look to the relief of being able to take a breather from this sort of activity once everything is done.

There's also the knowledge that this sort of thing (hopefully) comes once in a lifetime, and that it might be worth living all of it up - soaking in every moment of logistical nightmare, ex-hating, anxiety-ridden-packing, frenetic scurrying back and forth to make sure that we have everything we need for the big day...

There's a sort of humility in knowing that we're going to stand up there and declare to the Universe, "Forever!", and hope that the Universe nods and goes, "So it shall be." To hope that the both of us continue to place our relationship at the forefront, continue to build walls where there should be walls and windows where there should be windows, and not take our eyes off the blueprint of partnership and love.

There's a lot of books on marriage - how to keep one healthy, how to avoid damage, how to repair and rebuild... I don't see that stuff in wedding planning books. Maybe its because I'm not looking for it, maybe its because I'm looking in the wrong places, but I think that there are a lot of things that aren't addressed... There's an entire romance about weddings that - while necessary, and exciting, and - well, romantic - is detrimental I think, in the sense that people don't acknowledge that it's only a part of the story.

People don't talk about how to keep a family from crashing and burning when they don't like your chosen partner, they don't talk about the mental overload of details, they don't talk about maintaining stamina, or going into debt, or nearly going into debt, or the strain that can put on people. They don't talk about how to say no, or how not to lose yourself, or how not to live through your children; they don't talk about boundaries and space and time and how to be good to yourself as best as you can, or how much time planning will take and how to work that in on top of your already jam-packed schedule. They don't talk about meshing cultures as seamlessly as possible, or how to be okay with other people being angry at you while they process whatever it is that you're doing; they don't talk about how to stick to your guns without drawing them on someone. They don't talk about coping with your parents being angry, or unsupportive, and they don't talk about how to respect your child's wishes, and treat them like an adult in the truest sense of the word.

There's just a lot of things they don't talk about.