Getting Lost in the Chaos

Our family is getting ready for yet another wedding this weekend (we have 10 this year!!) and I can't help but think about the amazing, evolving and ever changing entity that is a marriage. We all know marriage is two people coming together as one to share a life yada, yada but I think so many people commit to a marriage and don't really know what they are getting in to. An engagement which used to be spent preparing for a marriage is now spent planning for a wedding, planning which used to happen in a matter of months happens in a year or sometimes two! It is all so commercialized and pinterested it seems many young brides (and their families) have started to miss the boat, to varying degrees, on what marriage truly is for and what it is actually about. I know I was guilty of getting swept up in the process, thank goodness pinterest was not around yet or I would probably still be planning my wedding! 

The tricky thing is, while people almost always get married for the same general reasons, a formal commitment to share a life, what a marriage looks like for one person is completely different for another person.  There is no one size fits all definition of marriage. So here is where it comes back to the people in the bride's and groom's life to prepare their minds and hearts for marriage. It does not matter how long you have been married or whether or not you are still married, I am sure everyone who has been through it has at least one if not many more things they learned, were surprised by, hurt by, wished they did better and so on.

Knowledge is power and future newlyweds need it. Marriage is a commitment and a mindset, a state of being. 

At the wedding this weekend I will be reading something the bride asked me to write. I am so honored she included me and truly humbled she wants my two cents during her ceremony. I really had to ask her multiple times if she was sure she wanted to hear from me, a lowly 3.5 year veteran of marriage.  Didn't she want to hear from someone who was married a long time? Maybe an aunt, her parents, a God parent? What could I really bring to the table? Although as I thought about it, I realized we who are newer to this marriage gig are the perfect people to offer advice to newlyweds; real, honest, and relevant advice. We can still remember the first few weeks, months, and years of our marriages, relatively speaking we are still one of those newlyweds and can identify with the early marriage adjustment, trials and challenges our friends may soon experience. 

This request certainly gave me a really good chance to look at my own marriage. Something I probably should have done more after a year of raising our first child and making a big move to a new home. I will post the reading in the coming days but want to give the bride a chance to hear it first.

What about you, did you get caught up in the planning process for a wedding? When was the last time you took an honest look at your marriage? What advice would you give someone on their wedding day?