Welcome back! It's been a very long time since I've posted...
I wanted to start this blog post by reaching out to couples who are currently engaged, and having issues actually tying the knot due to the global pandemic we've found ourselves in! My thoughts are with all of you; wedding planning was stressful enough, I can't imagine not only having to change your date but also not even knowing whether your wedding 2.0 will be going ahead either. It's a totally shit time we find ourselves in and I really do send my sympathies to you.
While we're on the subject of the pandemic, I thought I'd update you all on how we've been. Anthony works in theatre, so although he is now back at work (helping with the leisure centre part of the business) and we are SO grateful for that, it is still heartbreaking watching the theatre industry crumble before our eyes. On a more positive note, the lockdown gave us such an incredible opportunity to spend quality time together. Due to Anthony's theatre schedule, he often worked evenings and weekends, and I work Monday-Friday 8-5, so more often than not, we were passing ships. But through lockdown, we had every weekend off together, and every evening! We started getting creative with date nights, with the most "extra" ones being "fine dining", "Italian" and "Beach". If my wedding dress was here, and not at my mums, I am 100% sure that would have been one of the other ones!
When we got engaged, it was a week before my 23rd birthday, and I had just turned 24 when we got married. Now I know I was by no means a teenage bride, and a lot of people get married younger! But one of the comments I got the most while I was engaged was "you're still young, you don't need to rush into marriage".
So how do I feel about this 2 and a half years later? Was I wrong? Was I too young?
In a word - NO! We got married at the exact time I wanted to! When we were both at uni, we put together a "life timeline", of what age we wanted to be when the significant milestones in our life took place. I can't remember the exacts, but I'm pretty sure it went something like the below:
22 - engaged
23 - married
25 - first baby arrives
Now we've definitely missed the first baby milestone as we're both now 26 and not even trying... but in our defence, we put this together when we were young and naïve and didn't think about things like MONEY! (Spoiler alert - buying a house costs a lot of money. Getting married costs a lot of money. Just LIVING!! costs a lot of money. And currently, we can't afford a baby in the way we would like to, so that's on the back burner for now.)
This brings me to the second reason I'm glad we got married young. We are not feeling the pressure to hurry up and have a baby! If we had waited until mid-late 20s to get married (as most people suggested we should), I can guarantee that right now my biological clock would be ticking very loudly in my ears! We've loved the last two years of married "bliss" (sometimes more blissful than others!) and I'm so glad that generally speaking, we haven't felt like we need to rush our time alone and start a family right away after marriage. I know it could be argued that we still would have had that time in the years before marriage, but marriage is different. Not much changes, but I genuinely feel like your feelings for your partner do change; they deepen. Don't get me wrong, the honeymoon period has worn off, but I still find myself every so often looking at Anthony and just thinking "how did I bag him as my husband? How did I get so lucky?" (he absolutely hates this - the amount of time he turns around and I'm staring at him! It freaks him right out). So I will forever be grateful that we've had the opportunity to be husband and wife, and really enjoy it, before the stress of becoming parents begins.
One of the only negatives that I could find to being a "young bride" is confidence. My journey with self-confidence has been a rocky one, but no matter how much my confidence has peaked and troughed, one thing that remains apparent to me is that confidence increases with age. If I was getting married now (pandemic aside), I would be THRIVING as a bride! When I was engaged, I reveled in it behind closed doors, but I was very conscious about it in front of people. I still spoke about it left right and centre, but things like wedding dress shopping, my hen do's (yes, do's - plural! I may have been lacking confidence but I still milked it for all it was worth!) and even the morning of the wedding, I was still holding back. Now, it would be a whole new story! And I do get a slight pang of jealousy when friends of mine get engaged now, because I know how different their experience will be from mine.
However, overall, it was amazing. We had the best day, and I have no regrets about getting married at 24! February will be our 3rd wedding anniversary, but it will also be 10 years that we've been together, so we were going to throw an anniversary party and that was going to be my chance to revel in that "bridal" feeling again (even though I'm well aware that I wasn't going to be a bride!). However, Covid has definitely burst that bubble and I think we'll be having another one of our little themed date nights instead - maybe that's the one where I can whack the wedding dress out again!
Thank you all for reading, I will try and find more to write about! I love writing these, but particularly while we're all basically locked in our homes, there is really not much exciting going on... but if anyone has any topics they'd like to see a post on, then let me know!
Much love!
x
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