I Do
So I recently got married.
Yes, thank you. It’s very exciting! Yes, She’s very beautiful. Yes, I love her very much. I had a lot of fun that day, and we have had many fun days since moving in together planning the house, our schedules and just spending time to together. But there was an unexpected, slightly unsettling lack of change in feelings. I didn’t feel like a married man now despite going through the ceremony and signing the papers. I expected there to be some change inside of me, but the day after the wedding I felt the same way about her and myself as I did the day before. That was strange to me.
I proposed in August of 2024. The proposal didn’t go at all how I had planned. I had expected it to be this big, grand gesture where I would blow her away and make her cry from how sweet I was being. It didn’t do that. The other thing that I noticed was that it didn’t feel like I was engaged. It still felt very similar to how things were before I had propose. The only thing that really changed was that we started planning for a wedding.
I thought that was strange, but I hand-waived it away and told myself that surely I would feel different when we were married. So we went about our days: dating, eating out, planning the wedding, working hard and watching shows. We set the wedding date for 6 months after the proposal. There was a lot of work involved, but we really enjoyed the process and planned most of it together. Due to her being Filipino, we decided on having two weddings - one in Canada for my friends and family and one for hers in the Philippines.
For the Canadian wedding, one of the first things we did was book the venue. We decided that the wedding would be only about 40-50 people. With that in mind and the fact that we knew we wanted a very simple wedding, we were able to narrow it down to a few choices. The most interesting to us, and ultimately the one that we went with, was an antique local restaurant. They had the perfect space that held about 55 people. Perfect! We went ahead and booked it in October for the February wedding. However, the Owner of the restaurant was not the most responsive of people and we occasionally went many days without any replies from him regarding our questions. I get that he was probably busy, but with a wedding being one of the most stressful things I’ve ever planned in my life, I wish that this had not been so annoying to try and get details out of him. Alas, at least that was the worst of it. They venue was great to us at the end of the day, my issues with the communication aside.
Something that I didn’t expect was that the 2 weeks leading up to the wedding were very busy! There kept on being things that popped up that needed our attention. It didn’t help that we were also moving at the end of the month, and we were trying to pack our houses with any spare time we had, I suppose. But there were things like: having a guestbook, sending out reminders to people, confirming each and every detail with the venue and catering, printing the signage and I’m sure some other things that I’ve already stricken from my memory. And we had a very small wedding! We didn’t have rings or a band or seating arrangements or any of the dozens of other things that were offered to us. I can only imagine that a more traditional wedding would have twice the number of last minute tasks to complete. If you plan to get married and plan it yourself, please leave your schedule free for the weeks leading up to it!
With all that planning and business over, the day had come! This was another very strange thing: despite all the business leading up the wedding, on the actual day of it we had very little to do in the morning. We woke up and had breakfast and then just kinda hung out for a few hours before the preparations started. There were tasks that needed to be completed on the day still, but one thing we did very well was make a very strict and structured plan for what we were doing that day. We had the things that needed doing and the times we would do them all written down and shared with the friends that were helping us. That helped relieve a lot of stress because there was no guesswork involved in what we were supposed to be doing.
Finally the time came. The pastor arrived and we went over the plan for how the small ceremony would look like. That took only about 5 minutes. When he was done he asked where he was supposed to sit. I hadn’t thought of that since our head table was supposed to be brought in later. As I was looking around to make a decision, another guest walked up to me to chat and asked where they should sit too. Now it dawned on me that we hadn’t considered a seating arrangement, nor had we designated a host to guide people and the night. I guess that was my role!
Thus, for the moments that I was not getting congratulated, or saying my vows, or singing the marriage papers, I was also the host and the DJ. I actually enjoyed it so I don’t feel bad that’s how it ended up. But that would be something to keep in mind for future events where I’m supposed to be one of the main attractions. Please don’t make my mistake as well!
We had a wonderful time and were truly blessed by all the company and gifts. I enjoyed it very much! And then it was over. We went home together and had to drive my sister to the airport the next morning at 5am. What a wonderful honeymoon!
But the next few days, I kept on expecting there to be a change in how I felt about myself more than anything. I was a married man now. This was something I had wanted for years. It was something that I had been looking forward to for months. And yet, afterwards it was just done. There were no significant changes in how we felt about each other. I still have to go work on Monday’s.
I asked a few other married people I know about it and they all said the same: Nothing changed after the wedding. This was odd to me for two reasons:
I expected a change.
I had heard people mention that there was something different about getting married, even after living together before.
In regards to the second one, perhaps everyone has a different reaction to getting married. Maybe for some it was a huge, lifechanging event that made everything different. I can’t say.
I think the big surprise for me was that there was a huge expectation for something that didn’t come. It almost felt like something was missing. There is something there that I want to highlight. It happened when we got engaged and it happened when we got married and that is this: Despite my expectation that I would feel married, I didn’t. Despite all the build up and all the expectations, I don’t yet feel ‘married.’ I still feel like the same 32 year old that’s trying to figure out where to go in life. My identity is not yet that of a married man. I wonder why that is?
This makes me want to make the statement: Events don’t change your identity. Most likely it will be changed through the hundreds of tiny moments that follow the wedding. Maybe it will change after the years of tiny alterations to the way I see things and the decisions that I must now make as a married man. Maybe I don’t see myself as a married man yet, because I have not yet proven to myself that I am.
I’ll check back in 5 years from now and see if my identity has shifted.