It’s Not About the Dress

The wedding venue, the dress, the flowers, the photographer…when did all this get to be so important?  

Rather than making TV shows like “Say Yes to the Dress,” we would like to have a reality TV show where a young couple gets together with their parents and grandparents and they talk about the REAL stuff of life and love.  One thing is for sure… It’s not about the dress.  It’s about what to say (or NOT say) when your spouse doesn’t get home from work at the time you expected.  It’s about dirty dishes and dirty diapers.  It’s about planning holidays around two different families often hundreds of miles apart. It’s about HOW to express feelings in a healthy way.   

Rather than the perfect wedding dress, marriage is about laughing at spontaneous inside jokes with your spouse, who is also your best friend.  It’s about that knowing look and heart melting moment when after 5 or 15 or 55 years of Marriage, ‘your song’ comes on the radio. It’s also about the peace and security that overwhelms you as you lay in bed together, after an exhausting day of work and laundry and getting kids to school and practice. It’s about making many small decisions to love, every day.

The dress doesn’t even register on a scale that measures fulfillment in married life.  Have you ever seen someone’s wedding dress on display at their 40^thor 50^th wedding anniversary?  It’s profound if you think about it – she said, ‘yes’ to THAT particular dress- but, imagine all the much more important ‘yeses’ she and he have said to each other over those years!  What a wonderful, complicated journey it is!