Me and Sarah got married this year, finally, after 11 years together. I’ve stopped blogging as much as I used to, because it’s hard to believe that anyone gives a fuck, but I’ve documented every other major relationship event here, so I should probably do this too.

I used to be militant against marriage. I find it hard to remember exactly why now. I think it was something about how everyone just does what everyone else does, mixed in with something about how much control over weddings the church and govt have.

As I’ve got older that all seems a bit stupid. Sarah never really asked to get married, even though it must be shit as fuck to have a different name to your kids. I’d planned to propose for a long time, but really wanted to wait until the kids were old enough to remember the day. We’d waited anyway, so why not wait on purpose.’

Covid

We were meant to get married last year. We’d booked a place, we had the date, I even went to a wedding exhibition.

We got an email offering refunds from them because of lockdown and stuff. I told them to keep the deposit and hold the date, if it falls though it falls though. Then the guy phoned me and said don’t tell anyone buy they’re going out of business so to definitely take the refund.

New Place

So we found a new place. And it was nicer. It didn’t have a green carpet and we could get married outside. So we were happy that the first one got cancelled.

Sarah really took control of everything, she loved party planning. I’ve got no opinions.

Covid, again

Covid was still causing issues, so we changed our date even further back, to where it surely would be safe. A couple of months later the govt came out and said they were going to lift all restrictions on a certain date, and that date turned out to be a week before the wedding, so we couldn’t believe our luck.

But when the time came, they decided to have another two weeks to decide what to do.

So we were looking at the wedding and thinking about cancelling again. We wouldn’t be allowed to get married outside. Even though it’s outside it has to be under some kind of structure. The structure was 2 meters wide. There had to be 2 registrars and they had to be 2 meters apart, and 2 meters away from us. We couldn’t fit our dinner guests because each guest needs 2 square meters and there wasn’t enough square meters. It was all so stupid.

So the wedding we were facing was indoors, in a smallish restaurant, with half our guests outside because of limited numbers, and everyone wearing masks – including us. There was a tense call with the wedding planner where half way through Sarah cried and walked off and left me in stunned silence.

Marquee

So we started looking at solutions. If you got a marquee and had one side opened that counted as outside. So each guest only needed half a square meter.

Even the govt chipped in and made special exceptions for outside weddings, so that was all solved too. We were happy.

Weather

With Covid dealt with, we could start worrying about the weather. If it pissed down we’d be getting married indoors anyway, with half our guests, and all wearing masks.

As the wedding got closer I was checking the weather on 3 different apps. They all agreed that it was going to rain.

Big Day

The big day came and it didn’t rain. It looked like it could, but it didn’t. It was hot without being too hot. It all worked out great for us really.

We’d purposely kept it to just family.. so there weren’t any nerves. Everything was nice and relaxed, lets get married, lets eat some food, lets go to sleep. The only thing that really hurt was the first dance. That was the worst 4 minutes of my life.

A few days after the wedding a bunch of the guests got covid, including Sarah and Alex. So we hadn’t really escaped it at all.

Let me tell you something though, there’s nothing that will ever beat that feeling of getting into bed on your wedding night, knowing that you don’t have to think about getting married anymore, that it’s done and out the way. Lying there defragging your brain, deleting all the stuff you no longer need to remember. The best feeling ever.