We don’t talk a great deal around here about what comes after the wedding. Heck, we don’t even discuss honeymoons very often! It’s not that we don’t care or don’t think about it. We’re just usually more focused on the actual wedding, what with being a wedding planning blog.

But the fact is that while it’s fun and easy to talk about flowers and dresses and menus and jewelry, there’s an entire marriage after the wedding, and we do think it’s important to consider that marriage.

If you’re old enough to even be thinking about getting married, chances are you’ve learned somewhere along the line that compromise is important. If you haven’t learned it by the time you start planning, chances are you’ll have a better understanding of the concept at the end of the process. No matter what your budget or how mellow all the players involved happen to be, a wedding will entail some compromises in some area.

But what about your happily ever after?

Marriage entails a lot of compromise on a daily basis. What to eat and who cooks it, which movie to see, whether to save first for his big priority or yours, who takes out the garbage vs who scrubs the bathroom…you’re going to wind up making deals about a lot of things.

Some of these choices are easy. I do the cooking, because Mr. Twistie only knows two settings on the burners: high and off. Also, I’m home when it’s time to start cooking far more consistently and I love to cook. I also do the dishes because I actually like that part. Call me freaky, but I do. Mr. Twistie may think that bit was a compromise, but really it was a matter of personal preference as much as self-preservation.

Some are harder. I moved to a new city. I’d lived in my hometown literally as long as I could remember. I’d lived in the same house since I was two years old, and I got married at thirty. Yeah, I tend to stay where I’m put. By contrast, Mr. Twistie had only lived in his hometown since he was nine, and could remember living in two other cities. So why was I the one to move?

We each had one older parent living at the time, but while my father was active and had a nice nest egg to live on and lots of close friends right at hand, my mother in law had a smaller social circle, little cash, worse health, and a language barrier (she was originally from Japan and had developed her own personal English slang that virtually nobody but Mr. Twistie actually understood). Mr. Twistie had a band, and all the players lived in his city. Me? I had a nice job at a local bookstore, friends with cars, and a healthy respect for all the time that Mr. Twistie had been spending on the road coming to get me or taking me home during the time we’d lived more than an hour apart. I figured I could get another nice job in another nice bookstore (which I did pretty quickly). It was a wrench, but I was more than willing to make the choice.

On the other hand, I didn’t give up my name. That was important to me. Mr. Twistie didn’t care whether I changed my name so long as I changed my address. I wasn’t willing to give up my cat. Mr. Twistie – who hadn’t lived with a pet since his dog died almost twenty years before – had to learn how to live with a cat. Love me, love my cat, and there’s no way I’m changing that.

Over the years, we’ve made thousands of compromises, large and small. Which comes first? Getting me a decent stove, or doing a pressing of his latest album? We hash it out. One of us wants to eat Mexican and the other Italian. We hash it out. We compromise. Sometimes one gets the win, sometimes the other. The important thing is that when it matters, we sit down and talk like adults until we have a decision that both of us are contented to accept.

People talk all the time about how hard it can be to plan a wedding, and it can be, depending on your vision vs your resources vs the expectations of others who believe (rightly or wrongly) that they have a say in the matter. Compared to marriage, though, weddings are easy. You know that when a certain date is past, it’s over and there’s nothing you can do to change it. Marriage is open-ended. It’s vision vs resources vs expectation every single day. Then you get up the next morning and start all over again.

Of course, there are rewards to marriage that cannot be overstated, and some that can’t even be quantified. If it were nothing but an endless miserable slog, it wouldn’t be worth doing at all. If that’s where your marriage is, then it’s time to see if something can be done to change it. If change cannot be worked out, then it’s time to stop making yourselves miserable and go your separate ways.

Every once in a while, though, it’s good to take a look at where you are and remind yourself of what you will and won’t give up.

Me? I’m never giving up Mr. Twistie. Why? Because I firmly believe that thirty years of compromises from now, we’ll look just like this:

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 20th, 2010 at 1:51 pm by Twistie and is filed under Advice, After the wedding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.