Weddingbee Blog

Because I’m pretty honest about my first marriage — both good and bad — I sometimes get messages or comments from women who are marrying as young as I was the first time, wanting to know what I would have done differently (other than, I suppose, not being young). I suspect other readers have been turned off by the same topic, figuring I just made stupid decisions that had little to do with my relative youth. In my last session with my fabulous therapist, he asked me the same thing: what could I have done differently?

Thing is, I didn’t think I needed to do anything differently, not at 21. There’s not a thing you could have said to me that would have made me doubt our ability to make our marriage work. We loved each other, we’d lived together, we knew each other’s weaknesses. How could we fail?

So accepting that waiting to get married wasn’t gonna happen, I would say to myself: decide that no matter what, you won’t get divorced until you’re 31*. Wish for it, consider it, but then set it aside until your 31st birthday. On that birthday, take stock of your relationship and then decide.

Your mid-twenties are going to be turbulent years, years spent trying to figure out how to extricate the threads of your own being from the cloth of your family. You’re going to feel lost, and alone, and not very sure about anything… and you will blame your husband and your marriage for that. You’ll believe you have lost yourself in him, are alone because he’s not with you, would know yourself better if you didn’t have to worry about him, and while that may be a little bit true, it’s mostly not. Without a pact — a real, honest, boots-on-the-ground commitment — to not actually leaving until those years are behind you, you will lose a wonderful man who was a great husband. You’ll discover that your life is just as crazy without him as it was with him and you’ll suddenly realize that it wasn’t him, it was you all along.

I love the wedding ritual Miss Cowboy Boot blogged about because it’s so real it’s mind-blowing. In my determination to learn all I could to recover from my divorce, I’ve talked to countless married couples, all of whom confirmed there will be times you will contemplate divorce. Really? Yes, even the ones who’d been married for decades. Without preparing for them, you might believe — like I did — the problem was in your choice of mate. And you might be right… but you might be wrong.

So we’ll be building our own little Lifeboat Box, and I’d love to hear other ideas for how to make it through rough times. I’m also asking guests to share words of wisdom rather than the more traditional well wishes. I’ll even provide envelopes so nobody feels uncomfortable being honest. Do you have any words of wisdom to share with a new bride? Please share. I’ll take all the help I can get.

*For some reason, 31 seems like a good grown-up age to me. I suppose it might be different for you.