#Love

Like many of our generation, we grew up questioning the meaning of marriage and feeling uncomfortable with the idea that we could celebrate our love in this way whilst for many of our friends this opportunity was still illegal. It was this that first got us questioning what marriage really meant. We knew we wanted to get married but we wanted to create a wedding and a marriage that worked for us.

For us, love is about discovering the person under all the masks we wear and appreciating what you find. It’s about honesty, integrity and openness and we wanted our wedding to reflect that. Having a traditional Christian service with words we barely understood, wearing clothes that were so far removed from who we are as people in our everyday lives, felt entirely wrong. We wanted to celebrate what we had found in each other, and also the love for and from all our family and friends by which we felt so surrounded.

We looked around us, talked to friends, had late night conversations with those in the longest and strongest marriages and with those who were divorced. One thing we realised is that one of the greatest pressures on a relationship is the feeling that one person needs to be your ‘everything’ - needs to fulfil every need for ever after. The other was that people often get lost within their roles as husband, wife, mother, father. Both of us have been in long term monogamous and very controlling or abusive relationships in the past and we also wanted to push back against the idea of ‘giving yourself’ to someone or the need to ‘belong’. Instead we hoped to explore how we might support each other to be the purest version of who we each are and who we become as we grow and change.

And so, when we got married, we designed a ceremony that made room for the concept of anicca, or impermanence. We wrote our own vows and spoke about the inevitability of change and pledged to support one another as we continued to evolve. We meant it, but we had no idea what that might look like.

In reality is has taken great courage. It has meant that our love is built on honesty and not a need to build up or placate each other’s ego. We know that what we have is pretty perfect — a close friendship, mutual support and admiration, compatible co-parenting but we also have a different energy, ambition and thirst for life and new experiences. We recognise that these different interests, passions and needs exist and that we might not have the ability, interest or time (as parents) to explore all of these together. Through giving each other freedom and space we each bring so much more to the table.

Too often marriage is seen as an endurance test. We congratulate people for getting to markers along the way, we talk a lot about compromise and sacrifice. But maybe if we stopped and questioned why these are necessary, we’d find its because we are trying to fit society’s preconceived ideas of what love and marriage should be. Maybe longevity isn’t the best indicator of a relationship’s success. Why not measure marriages by the level of satisfaction reported, or the actualisation achievable, or how much the people respect one another at it’s end whenever that may be?

They say, if you love someone let them free - that a caged bird doesn’t sing.

anonymous