The Morning After Forever

The strange thing about getting married is that tomorrow still comes.

This morning, I woke up next to my husband.

I have slept beside Craig more times than I could possibly count over the last six years, so there was nothing unfamiliar about the man beside me. Same face. Same body. Same person I have woken beside at home, in hotels, on trips, after beautiful nights and difficult days.

Except today, he is my husband.

I lay there for a minute letting that word settle into me.

Yesterday morning, I was waiting for my hair and makeup girl to arrive while Craig was somewhere in Ubud trying to replace the pearl earring I had lost at the rice terrace. I was nervous and emotional and trying to hold a day I knew would move far too quickly.

And it did.

There are pieces of yesterday that already feel strangely dreamlike. I remember getting ready. I remember the anticipation. I remember the music beginning and knowing the song I had written for my entrance was finally going to become part of this moment we had spent so long imagining.

But there was another song Craig knew nothing about.

I had been working on it for literally months. It carried pieces of what I wanted to say to him in my vows, some of the things I wanted him to understand about the love I was promising him and the life I wanted us to keep building. My plan was for it to play while we read our vows to one another. It will also become the music underneath our wedding video, which somehow makes it feel even more precious now. The words will live alongside the images of that day long after the day itself is gone.

Until yesterday, only I and the wedding team knew about it.

Then Craig began his vows.

He went first, and as I stood there listening to him, something almost surreal started happening. He began saying things that aligned so closely with the song I had secretly spent months writing and with the vows I was about to say to him that I remember thinking, How did you do this? How did you somehow meet me here without knowing where I was going?

He hadn’t heard the song.

He hadn’t read my vows.

I hadn’t read his.

Yet somehow we had arrived at the same place.

It was one of the most breathtaking parts of the entire wedding for me, and it had nothing to do with the setting, the flowers, the dress, or Bali. It was standing across from this man and realizing that while we had prepared separately for that moment, we had been thinking about our marriage in ways that somehow found each other before the words did.

Even our minister couldn’t keep his reaction entirely professional.

“WOW.”

That was it.

And honestly, it was exactly right.

There are some moments I don’t want to over-explain because explaining them makes them smaller. I don’t know whether I call something like that coincidence, intuition, spiritual alignment, six years of knowing one another, or some combination of all of it.

I only know what it felt like standing there.

It felt like recognition.

There are other pieces of yesterday I know photographs and video will eventually give back to me because I was too inside them to fully see them while they were happening. That may be one of the strange things about your own wedding. Everyone else gets to watch it while you are trying to live it.

Then somehow the ceremony you spent months planning becomes something that happened yesterday.

The dress comes off.

The flowers are left somewhere. Hairpins come out one by one. Makeup gets washed down the sink. Someone packs something away. The secret song isn’t a secret anymore. You look around and realize the enormous day you were waiting for has quietly become a memory.

And then you go to sleep.

I don’t know why I find that so moving this morning.

Maybe because we put so much emphasis on beginnings that we sometimes forget how quietly life continues after them. There should almost be some dramatic shift in the atmosphere after you get married. The universe should at least have the decency to acknowledge the paperwork.

Instead, morning comes.

The jungle wakes up. The monkeys apparently continue whatever ongoing neighborhood disputes monkeys have. Someone makes coffee. There are clothes on the floor and things to find and messages on our phones. Eventually we will have to figure out what we’re doing today.

Life has absolutely no respect for dramatic transitions.

I think I love that.

Because underneath all the beauty of yesterday, this is what I wanted.

Not only the wedding.

This.

I wanted to wake up married to him.

There is a difference I can feel even though I can’t entirely explain it yet. Nothing about Craig changed at 4:44 yesterday afternoon. Nothing about me changed in some magical, instantaneous way either. We didn’t walk away from the ceremony suddenly knowing more about each other than we knew an hour earlier.

Yet something happened.

We stood before one another and said things we had each arrived at separately. We put rings on each other’s hands. We made promises in front of God. We took something that had belonged mostly to the private world between us and spoke it where other people could hear.

Today I can feel the weight of having said it.

Not a heavy weight.

More like something settling into place.

For six years, Craig has been my partner, my lover, my person, my friend, the man I share a home and a life with. Those things were real before yesterday. Marriage doesn’t reach backward and make them more legitimate.

But I understand now why language matters.

Calling him my husband feels different in my mouth.

Maybe because there is history behind the word now. Not the history of marriage yet. We have approximately one day of expertise there, so nobody should be asking us for advanced instruction.

I mean the history that brought us to the word.

Six years came before husband.

Whole lives came before husband. Children came before husband. Other loves came before husband. Losses and mistakes and enormous amounts of growing up came before husband. We didn’t meet at the beginning of our stories, and yesterday wasn’t the beginning of them either.

It was a marker placed somewhere in the middle.

Maybe that is why this morning feels less like I entered a new life and more like something inside my existing life has been named.

I keep thinking about how ordinary today is allowed to be.

We don’t have to prove anything. We don’t have to wake up transformed into some shinier married version of ourselves. We don’t have to spend every second staring lovingly at each other because we exchanged vows yesterday.

We can drink coffee. We can be tired. We can laugh about something stupid. We can wander around Bali. We can have sex. We can take a nap. We can disagree about where something was packed.

We can just be married.

There is so much relief in that sentence.

Maybe because I have reached an age where I am less interested in moments that look perfect and more interested in lives that feel like mine.

Yesterday was extraordinary.

I wanted extraordinary.

I wanted the dress and the ceremony and Bali. I wanted the songs I had written. I wanted the surprise. I wanted beauty and intention and photographs and a moment where the world seemed to narrow down to the two of us standing there.

And somehow, one of the most extraordinary parts wasn’t something I planned at all.

It was discovering that the words Craig had prepared for me and the words I had been quietly preparing for him had already found each other.

I am glad we made something beautiful out of our wedding day.

But I don’t want to live inside a wedding.

I want to live inside a marriage.

Those are completely different things.

A wedding asks you to stop your life for a day. Marriage gives it back to you.

That may be what I am feeling this morning. My life has been handed back to me, except now there is this new word inside it.

Wife.

I haven’t been thinking much about what it means to have a husband without also thinking about what it means to be a wife. Not in some prescribed version of womanhood. Not as though I surrendered myself at the altar yesterday and received a new job description in return.

I mean something more intimate than that.

I chose a relationship to belong to without ceasing to belong to myself.

Today is the first day I get to discover what that feels like from inside the promise rather than standing in front of it.

There will be plenty of time for the serious parts. Life will find us again. Eventually we will fly home. There will be children and work and bills and laundry and schedules waiting for us. There will be days when Bali feels very far away.

But not today.

Today I want to let this be new.

I want to say “my husband” unnecessarily a few times just because I can.

I want to look at his hand and see the ring there. I want to remember the sound of his vows and that strange moment of realizing how closely his words matched something I had been creating for him in secret for months. I want to hear that song again now that it belongs not to something I was planning, but to something we actually lived.

I want to let the photographs come later and allow my own body to remember first.

Mostly, I want to enjoy the peculiar sweetness of discovering that after all the anticipation, all the planning, and all the meaning we placed around yesterday, marriage begins with something wonderfully unremarkable.

Morning.

The same man is beside me. The same woman is inside my skin. The jungle is outside our room. Coffee is waiting. Our wedding happened yesterday, and our life is already moving again.

Only now, when I reach for him, I get to smile at the quiet strangeness of knowing that the man I have loved for six years is my husband.

And this morning, before life asks anything else of us, I am simply going to enjoy being his wife.

→And now I want to hear from those of you who have been married for a while.

Do you remember the first morning you woke up as someone’s husband or wife? Did it feel different, even though almost nothing had actually changed?

And if you’ve been married 10, 20, 30, 40 years or more, tell me this: What do you know about marriage now that you wish you could have whispered to yourselves on that very first morning?

I have a feeling there are some beautiful answers to that question.

From the other side of I do,

Rene

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This post was previously published on medium.com.