The Truth About Weddings

As the well-known and oft-mangled quote by Kierkegaard goes, "Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards." Or something like that. This resonates with me most when I reflect back on our wedding day.

I want the truth to be known about weddings. For those hoping to get married or planning a wedding, try to ignore the magazines, the stars in your head, your rustic-lantern-and-flower-filled-mason-jar-riddled boards. These aren't important, and the day itself is nothing like you think, as far as floating serenely around in a cloud of whimsical perfection. It is exhausting and stressful for you, and your family, and bridal party and friends who are assisting you. It's best to just accept this. What is important to pay attention to is the astonishing amount of love and support that surrounds you everyday, which is made apparent by the occasion of a wedding. It is an opportunity to thank your family and friends for being in your life. This is also good practice for showing appreciation and love for the person you will be committing yourself to for the rest of your life.

To this end, I've created another photo journal. I would have included all 100+ photos if I could be reassured that you wouldn't fall asleep, but I do want to make it clear that we appreciate every member of the family, and every friend there, and everyone who travelled from New Zealand, Germany, the Philippines, the East Coast, the South, the Bay Area...or fought the traffic coming from LA/ Orange County...just to see us get married and spend a few minutes of face time with us. We also appreciate the warm wishes and generosity of everyone who couldn't come, and the bridal shower that M's family threw from across the country, without even knowing me. 

Most of the photos below are courtesy of Lauren Alisse Photography, but the truth-telling captions are mine:

This dress cost $500 at a trunk sale. I think it was still too much money for a dress that constantly threatened to fall down around my ankles on my wedding day, even with alterations.

My sister Joanna is responsible for the way I looked that day.  I chose to eschew mascara and eye makeup, and wore my usual Walgreens-purchased Neutrogena foundation and powder. She took out her makeup bag and quietly--and heroically--reversed my decisions for me. She also helped me change out of my wedding gown at the reception, and made numerous trips back and forth to the car for miscellaneous reasons, because that's what happens during weddings.

This is Heather Molchanoff of Hot Seat Salon, styling  my sister's hair. I did not know her before my wedding day, but she must be an engineer, because she made me look like I had a ton of hair without using any fake strands (thank you to my co-worker JoAnna Hyma, for this awesome wedding gift!). Also, Heather's husband and my sister's husband have, in their early twenties, gone naked surfing with a group of mutual guy friends from East County San Diego, and this photo is the moment where we figured out how we were all connected. Yes, you read that correctly.

I like the way M's dad is looking at M's mom in this picture, even after forty years of marriage

Moms being walked down the aisle by their sons. My mom's outfit may have taken 17 question-filled e-mails with attached photos, but I'm glad she finally picked one. I think she looks beautiful. 

I'm not going to pretend to be demure: walking down the aisle (confident that your appearance has been fixed by other people) while everyone is looking at you is freaking awesome. I know it will never happen again.

I spent a lot of time smiling at everyone who was smiling at me, until I realized M was at the end of the aisle, and then I spent the rest of the time smiling at him.

Pastor Adam Wright doing an amazing job. I mean that. It's not easy to intimately portray a couple's relationship in a wedding ceremony if you haven't spent a lot of time witnessing that relationship firsthand. I have no idea what I'd say about us as a couple if I didn't know us. "They look like they pay their bills on time"? "They'll probably make cute babies"? Adam seemed to have a spooky understanding of our love for one another and our faith in God. I also felt the gravitas of our commitment to one another. Adam is really good at his job.

I didn't know at the time, but in this picture, M is both pleased that we're married, as well as close to passing out from the fever he'd been harboring since five a.m. that morning.

Combined families! Everyone was so generous and understanding and supportive, it's hard to express in one photo caption. 

This one was actually swiped from my brother's Facebook. These are his little girls, who, like all the kids in attendance, were so cute and patient during all the boring wedding stuff. 

Ditto (M's nieces and the best flower girls ever.)

This is my sister's baby. He is both adorable, and, as a carrier of the norovirus, not to be trifled with. It's ok though. We still love you very much.

This is my dad. He and my mom, as he likes to tell me, spent every day praying that I would no longer be single.  I am thirty-two. That is a lot of praying.

Russell and Casey, two of M's best friends. Without them, we'd have had no audio at the ceremony, no one to pray for and take care of M when he couldn't move from fever and coughing, and no one to act as hilarious emcees, on last-minute request. These guys are not amateurs when it comes to weddings or brotherhood. 

Every wedding needs a GoPro. Thanks, Jeremy, for your assistant photography and your GoPro handling!

Aren't my girlfriends adorbs? I stole this picture from Facebook (thanks Nicolle!). The third girl from the left is Shannon, who generously volunteered to put table numbers on birch tree slices, even as she was recovering from the norovirus that my nephew gave her two weeks prior.  The third girl from the right is Brooke, who definitely got the wool pulled over her eyes when she agreed to be my day-of coordinator and became responsible for, like, everything that happened that day. All she got in return was a lousy REI card and my eternal love and gratitude.

This is our photographer friend Lauren (picture taken from her website). I know everyone promotes their own wedding photographer, but THIS girl was not forewarned that, at a wedding with many Chinese family members, she would be competing with many Chinese family member photographers. We got to benefit from that many more pictures from everyone, while she just had the job of adapting and moving around with utmost grace and professionalism, without complaining once. Oh, and we got our pictures back in, like, a week.

Instead of speeches, we asked for marital advice from our guests, which was read aloud during the reception. Thank you to everyone who contributed. We are keeping it all in a rustic vintage box, and in case you were wondering, yes, we are holding the advice entirely responsible for keeping our marriage intact. 

We were told repeatedly that no one dances at daytime weddings. Let the record show that San Diego hippies and surfers dance anywhere, anytime.

We are so thankful for everyone in this picture (and everyone who couldn't make it). We hope you felt the expression of our profound love through eye contact and smiles and the unlimited Mai Tai's and short ribs and sincere thank you notes written without the help of that abhorrent Thank You Note Template floating around Pinterest. We don't deserve the amount of love and generosity we were shown, but we accept it gratefully.

On our way to embark on the adventure of married life. Right after this photo, we went to Walgreens to pick up more medication for M (thanks to my physician brother-in-law, who welcomed M to the family by compassionately calling in prescriptions, at the drop of a hat, on three separate occasions for M's various ailments). And that is what a true wedding is all about.

The reality of being with a surfer

Some women in San Diego have a picture of what it's like to date a surfer. Yes, surfers are in shape. Yes, they are laid back and easygoing. Yes, they have impeccable taste in hoodies. In the beginning, all was as I imagined it would be. Before I had M locked up and had to pretend I was fun, he would take me out for surfing lessons and gently teach me, and I'd enjoy the novelty of a new adventure. We even went night surfing with the red tide. It was exciting to date a hardcore surfer, like I finally had the street cred to wear Volcom.

The flip side of the coin was that, as M and I became more serious, I had to learn not to make any plans more than 24 to 48 hours in advance, in case there was swell (and because having a pending obligation depresses him). This doesn't sound like a big deal, except when other people, like friends and family, want to get together at an agreed-upon time and place, or if other important things are happening simultaneously. When the waves were a rare head high in San Diego a couple summers ago, I let M off the hook as my date for a wedding (granted, it was a potluck wedding, but still). When we were picking out wedding bands, what should have been a sentimental occasion turned into our first real, tearful fight because Surfline and its spiking graphs would not go quietly into the night.

Further, since different surf spots are better at certain times of the year, if I want to plan something on a weekend in winter, I try to make it near Sunset Cliffs, and if we're planning a beach day in the summer, it's ideally near Swamis. I know that it's best to have food available at the end of a surf session. While M is paddling out, I'm often running errands or doing chores, taking care of the small burdens in life so that he won't have an immediate to-do list when he comes out of the water exhausted and happy. When I commit to plans with a group, I mentally prepare for the possibility of going alone, in case the surf is good.

My schedule is constantly in flux, my day always agile (see blog title: get it? It's also a software term, I...just nevermind).

Our wedding invitation, with my wedding veil and his Firewire, whatever that is.
(Invitation designed by Lauren Alisse Photogrpahy)

I don't say this to complain. I say this to underscore the reality of dating any "type," however positive; it takes true and dedicated love to want to make another person happy, all the time. We don't have the credibility of our parents--both sets happily married for decades--or even the credibility of two people married for six weeks, but we're trying to start out right. While I'm ignoring the giant plastic tub of wetsuits in our guest bathroom and the seven surfboards in the storage unit and our kitchen, M spends a lot of time at work, being the main breadwinner in our house, out-thinking the Android coding problems that plague him. He slow dances with me in the kitchen, listens quietly when I'm having a bad day, surprises me with tickets to country concerts, even though he prefers Glitch Mob. He tithes his money generously, lets me have the bigger piece of bread at dinner, books expensive horseback riding excursions on our honeymoon even though he has zero interest himself and there's downpouring rain in the Hawaiian countryside.

So, even though I've been married for, like, five minutes, I like to think the year or so of making compromises around the swell was as good premarital training as any. And reality can still have a happy ending.