I was 27 when I got married, just a baby.
When my younger sister got married just a couple of years later, I remember thinking to myself “she’s way too young to be getting married” despite the fact that she was actually the same I age I was.
Maybe I was right - 27 is way too young to be getting married - for me especially! I was a fledgling. I had sooooo far to go to figure out what kind of person I was - let alone who I wanted to be.
Our wedding was SO FUN. Perhaps especially so because most of our quite small list of favourite people in attendance already knew each other and very happily cross pollinated, danced and took the whole thing about as seriously as we did. There was no aisle, no white dress, no anxious ceremonial anything that wasn’t necessary. We had a blast.
I vaguely remember saying something or other on the night about not AT ALL expecting things to be easy breezy. Marcus and I were (are…?) very different. We have (had…?) different intellectual interests, different speeds, different friendships, different hobbies, and I think would have even said we weren’t exactly sure we wanted the same things from life.
Which is why I am so damn lucky to have him. He is such a grounded, consistent, diligent, caring, generous, emotionally self-contained, self-assured and independent person. He is the perfect counter-point and complement to my often impulsive, all-or-nothing, creative, emotional, wanderlusting, over-ambitious, naive optimism.
And over the past 15+ years - inevitably - we have rubbed off on each other. I have learned so much from him. I am now much more measured, steady, content. And perhaps he is more hopeful, curious, adventurous. And we’ve learned over 15+ years together, that at our core our values are the same - and perhaps we do want similar things… Not exactly the same, but the same enough that they can happily co-exist.
I am lucky too because in so many ways I am not at all the same person I was at 27 (let alone at 21 when we first met). I have changed so much in that time - and he has let me. But also I am still fundamentally the same person with the same quirks, frustrations, limitations and inconsistencies (we never really change that much) but I think he still likes me. And I still like him. Even more now than I did then. I had no way of knowing whether that would be the case, and neither did he. It certainly has not been easy breezy - far from it - but he was and still is my person.
We invited our loved ones to come and celebrate our new home on the hill with us 10 years after we got married just down the road. Here are some happy snaps (again by Danii Forde). So loved and so lucky.
