The Big Day?

One of the most wonderful things to happen in life is to meet a person who is your soul mate and lover, someone you want to spend your life with - even the rest of your life. Readers of this blog know that I have met and been with men who were soul mates for me but I knew I could not live with.

When I got engaged at the age of nineteen, I remember feeling a little hesitant about going from college into marriage even though I was crazy about Mickey. When I started the whole wedding planning process, I quickly became ill in my stomach at the importance friends and strangers put in the whole planning process and the wedding day itself. "It's the big event of your life," I was told by someone I respected.

Instead, I was thinking the big event of my life (up to that point) was the first night Mickey and I spent together and both of us being in love with the other. Exchanging vows in front of other people who mean a lot to us was certainly a charming thing to look forward to, no doubt. Having a big party to celebrate that event had a great deal of appeal for both of us.

But it could not be the big event in my life. The big day, never mind the most important day of my life as it was described by other friends and those strangers who wanted to help me in the wedding process. I felt that I was an alien not understanding the history and custom of the natives around me. I didn't get it. I understand the importance of marriage if you plan on having children or to legalize the relationship and the benefits that follow. Why all the to-do about it eludes me completely.

There is something very sad to me that an event such as a wedding day would be deemed THE important event in one's life. It was never imagined that way in my mind while I was growing up. I watch the TV shows and read articles about wedding days "ruined" because the hired band was awful or didn't show up; the dresses were not the way they should have been or the food wasn't up to snuff.

How could anything such as inadequate food, no music or bad music or botched gowns ruin a day that is supposedly about celebrating the union and love of two people? How can that even matter?

I raised eyebrows when I went to a wedding planner to talk about the basics of planning a wedding. She went through her spiel and then I said: "I am not going to be doing the garter belt thing and I won't be introduced as Mrs. Shultz at the reception. I am Nancy Kersey and I'll consider taking his surname in addition to my own. " Raised eyebrows, eyeballs shifted to look at others in our little circle.

"Oh we have a live one," I'm sure was the thought going around. I didn't care.

The whole business actually left my stomach in turmoil.

Honey, maybe you are not marriage material, I thought to myself.