Gettin' Hitched

(actually) June 17, 2009 at 9:04 pm ·

So we decided to get geeky and make a wedding blog. Hopefully this will help us communicate with the people we love and share our thoughts and challenges and whatever else comes along during the wedding planning process.

First, I need to get this out of the way–I haven’t kept a blog since high school. And I haven’t written in my personal journal consistently for about a year. Somewhere along the way, without realizing it, I think I may have lost my voice a little bit. So hopefully this little exercise will help me regain it. Already it has brought that much to my attention, which is a good, though uncomfortable thing. To complicate things, I’m now endeavoring to share a blog, so maybe there’s something powerful about the idea of having lost my written voice, now trying to, instead of just regain it, develop/discover Stephen’s and my collective voice.

But I’m still going to use the first person. We don’t want this to get weird :/

So, wedding! Where to start? Well, we got engaged at the end of March. We had been thinking a lot about marriage already, and the words “if” and “when” had become a source of both excitement and discomfort, as we attempted to balance our delight in the idea of marriage together with some sense of wanting to guard ourselves against making a decision too quickly or whimsically. Marriage is serious. We had to know. And anyway, he hadn’t even proposed yet. No one likes to feel presumptuous.

I had been traveling a bit–I went to South Korea (more on that later) to visit a friend in January, and my sisters and I had a little Los Angeles-style reunion in March. The time away was really hard but it turned out to be invaluable to me. I got the much-needed distance and time for reflection, and besides I got to leave the country and see my sisters. So it’s been a good year so far.

When Steve picked me up from the airport after L.A. we had dinner with my mom (who, by the way, drove all the way to Kansas City from Springfield just to buy us dinner. And then drove all the way back to Springfield at like 10pm. And went to work the next morning. She’s a fantastic lady). After dinner, we sat in the Dish parking lot while it poured down raining and got to talking about Stewie, Stephen’s little brother who is in the army and will be deployed to Iraq in September. Somewhere from that sobering realization something else dawned on us–Stewart has to be the best man at our wedding, in the same way that a helium atom has to have two protons in its nucleus (er, whatever). Wait, our wedding? Ohhh, so those freudian slips when I said “when we get married…” instead of “if we get married…” Okay. So what, we’re like engaged now? Are we sure? What? Of course we’re sure!

Still pouring down rain. We’re sitting in the car, so it’s hard to engage in the sort of dignified embrace such an occasion calls for. That’s okay though, we went to Steak ‘n’ Shake because I kind of wanted a milkshake and it just seemed impossible to spend the next two hours talking about this on the way back to Columbia. I got a side-by-side, and gave Steve the cherry. The waitress told us we were an “adorable” couple, which was super encouraging. I felt like I was on my first date. I was jittery. It was great.

We told our families, and they were wonderfully excited, encouraging, supportive, and amazing. This is the happiest, warmest, most at peace I’ve ever felt in my life.

Okay, here’s where the disconnect occurs, I think. We’d had so many wonderful (and sometimes difficult) conversations about what it means to be married, how spouses should treat each other, philosophies about raising kids (eek!), how a married couple should ideally interact with the world–great stuff. We even talked about finances, and the kinds of meals we’d like to make into family staples. All of this marriage talk was about…marriage, obviously. We were SO ready to be married. Here’s what we weren’t ready for: planning a wedding.

Nevertheless, we were excited, throwing around ideas, throwing out some traditional ideas (the garter? why? that’s really very weird to us), and having a good time of fancying ourselves in pretty clothes dancing and being in love. Ahhh,

It wasn’t my intention to make this a suspenseful episode, but that’s it for me now! More on the craziness of wedding planning soon. (We’ll spare you the trivial updates on flower arrangements and wedding shoes. Promise.)

-Andrea