Married jellies; what was your experience?

Wow. That could take years to answer! Well, it’s kind of like having a boyfriend and it’s really, REALLY hard to break up. So much at stake.

Big, short stories, everything is welcome. :)

Talking about being married or about our wedding day?

(The cake was fantastic…)

Well, I guess I could sum it up with, we had plenty of money but I was unhappy. After the divorce I had NO money, but I was happy.

Just got married in October. Day was fantastic, cake was delicious… people are still talking about the food.

Other than changing my name, not much was different. We already lived together for a couple of years.

@whitenoise Whichever one. One or the other, or both.

The wedding?

Awful, awful, horrible day. Stress up to here, forced to try to make a bunch of people happy that are incapable of being happy, to the detriment of my own happiness. And I had to pay for all of it. And anyone that I actually did count on to help dropped the ball. No respect was shown by the minister’s family. Even the minister was an embarrassment.

Honeymoon, however, was awesome. Ten days on a desert island with less than 5,000 people and no cell phone service. Very nice.

We’re still together, and no longer associate with any of the people who made the wedding day so hellacious.

I hated it.

Been married 30 years. I consider it the biggest adventure of my life.

The wedding was stressful, but beautiful.
The reception was in a room with no air conditioning. Even though it was only 70° outside, it was over 100° in the reception hall.
The cake was quite tasty. Neldams.
The marriage has lasted 29 years. It has had ups and downs, including about 3 years of pure hell, but we have gotten through it, and now that I have retired, and we are together 24/7, we are settlling in pretty well.

Wow, that’s a difficult question to answer in so many words. I’ll take a stab at it.

We met on MySpace (how embarrassing) at the tender age of 17, talked on the phone, started hanging out, and then began dating. Three years later, he asked me to marry him. Two years after that, we got married. The wedding day was nice, but everything leading up to it sucked for reasons similar to the ones @Seek_Kolinahr gave. During our first year of marriage, we bought our first house. He supported me through college, I recently graduated, and we’re currently enjoying the beauty of living as DINKS (dual income, no kids). We plan on trying for our first baby toward the end of this year.

Marriage is hard work and is far from perfect, but it’s worth it when you are lucky enough to marry your best friend. We have our issues, but I can’t imagine being with anyone else.

O…we talking about wedding days? First wedding in my dad’s condo. Went to the Cosmposphere in Hutch for our “honeymoon.”

Second wedding was at the lake. This was our honeymoon suite. I liked my second wedding better.

Well, hubby was leaving for the Navy. So we got married before the wedding. I like to joke that he is my second husband. First wedding was very tiny – siblings and parents. Went out to eat afterward and had a small cake. Loved every minute of it. Small, intimate.

The following year, we had the planned wedding. It was a pain! Too much work and money. Spent most of the time fulfilling social requirements. I always advise friends to elope and spend all of their money on a great honeymoon. When you get back send out announcements.

Love at first sight, dated a year, moved in for a year, engaged for a year, together ever since and plan on being so until death do us part. Happiness is different for all of us, I have the stablity I craved and he has the freedom he craved, so win-win.

My wedding day would have made a good episode in a sit-com. It was probably the cheapest wedding ever (cos we were broke at the time), I was four months pregnant, there were 12 people in attendance including me and my husband. My family (parents and siblings) arrived late and had obviously had a massive row with each other in the car on the way and my sister rushed upstairs in tears to change into her “bridesmaids” dress. We all set off for the registry office, I forgot the flowers and we had to go back for them. We arrived at the registry office with five minutes to spare and the “ceremony” didn’t take much longer than that. My dad did the photography, my mum made the cake, my dad’s best mate owned a Daimler and was “chauffeur” for the trip back, and the “reception” was a barbecue in my back yard.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…..

Weddings are stressful, when I’m not even the one getting married. Eloping sounds fine to me.

We eloped. We were too young but both sets of parents were determined to break us up so our friends raised the money for us to fly to S. Carolina where there was no blood test, no witnesses needed, no age law and only a 24 hr wait. So at 19 were married and they both backed off. I think we would both have preferred it if we’d had time to finish our bachelor degrees at least. We were dirt poor and worked our way through college and it was hard but we still love each other and we had 2 fantastic kids.

Everything from dating to the engagement, to the wedding and reception were really great, fun and exciting. We started having kids 2 years into the marriage and things did change. We became partners and parents and anyone with kids will tell you is challenging and a game changer. We have had issues with both our sons that put added strain on our marriage. Other issues gnawed away at the fabric of our love for each other including her growing resentment of my work. We survived a lot of conflicts and hurt feelings and a few very heated threats of divorce. Don’t ask me how but we are still together and actually happier together than we have been since we first got married.

Our oldest has graduated High School and going away to college and our youngest is increasingly independent which has lifted a lot of the extra burdens we had raising our boys and allowed my wife and I to spend more quality time together. Last year we bought kayaks and a tandem bike and are doing more things and spending more time together. This July we will celebrate our 20th anniversary. The glue that has kept us together is a mutual respect for each other, trust in each other and going out on regular dates like we did back when we were dating. So my advice is to never stop dating each other.

There is 3,000 miles of cold blue water between us which is just about enough.

Never married, I would only get married if it was to the right person. I have reconciled that now that I am in my forties that this is probably never going to happen and that it will only be me and my 2 girls in our family. I am happy with the life I have made for my children and myself and once our condo sells we will be heading south to North Carolina and maybe someday when I retire I will move to Hawaii where its always nice and warm all year round.

@creative1 “I would only get married if it was to the right person.”

I don’t think people generally make a habit of marrying someone they think is the wrong person. You typically find that out after the wedding.

@livelaughlove21 So very true but there are a lot of people who settle and than can’t figure out why it didn’t work

I’m right on board with @Seek_Kolinahr. My wedding day was the worst day of my life – I hated every minute of it, including my entire engagement, which my in-laws ruined – but the Martha’s Vineyard honeymoon was fabulous. We’re still married and in love after 22+ years. I’m living proof that the wedding is meaningless, and that it’s the marriage that really matters.

I too married my “best friend”. It was lovely for 10 years; we divorced during our 11th.

We’re still “best friends”, but in a different sense of the words…....

the wedding
The planning and build up was a ton of work — made more complicated by the fact that we decided to buy and remodel a house simultaneously. The actual wedding day was a blast. Big Italian wedding, lots of dancing, oodles of food – about 200 people; followed by a three-week honeymoon in Italy.

Note: We dated for nine years prior to getting married. We met when I was sixteen.

the marriage
Been seventeen-plus years now. Through it all (ups and downs, family drama, parenthood, etc.), I get to spend every day with my best friend in the whole world, who just happens to be a beautiful, intelligent woman. What else could I ask for?

@SadieMartinPaul When I told my dad that Robin had asked me to marry him I remember telling him telling me that it wasn’t the wedding that was important, it was the marriage.
Looking back…I’m not sure why that came up because I told him we were going to elope and he said he HAD to be a witness. So we had a small ceremony in his condo. But those other words stuck with me, either way.

My first wedding was an elopement in November. We had been together for nearly 4 years, and planned to marry once I was done with Grad. School, but I got pregnant while on the pill. $20.00 for the certificate and $20.00 for the officiant. My mother sewed me a teal dress and we bought him a new sport jacket. We took a long weekend driving the Blue Ridge Highway in Virginia as our ‘honeymoon’. After our son was born in May, we had a big barbecue and had all our family and friends to celebrate the marriage and birth. That was perfectly suited for our personalities, as neither of us liked being the center of attention.

The marriage lasted about 6 years because despite all his promises, he never did quit drinking, and only got worse. It had been a tempestuous relationship all along, and we both had major baggage from childhood abuse and neglect. Neither of us was emotionally stable, and he was an addict on top of that. We divorced when my son was almost 5, and he was 7 when his father died of liver failure. It was tragic, and yet a relief; because he had become so unstable that I feared for my safety and my son’s, as well.

•••••

On a much happier note, I am engaged now. My son is in his early 20s and still unsure about whether or not to attend college; so we are waiting to marry until he is sure that he won’t go to college, or until he is over the age where financial aid services require the parent’s income to be considered (if a parent is remarried, they consider the joint income; and I don’t think my fiancé should be obligated to pay tuition for a kid who was already 18 and out of High School when we met).

My fiancé and I were friends first and talked about the seriousness and commitment we wanted before we even went on our first date, so marriage is not likely to have much impact. We have been together for 4 years and living together for 3 years, and my son lives here, too. We already consider ourselves married, and most people we encounter assume that we are. I didn’t change my name the first time, and I do not plan to change it ever – so even that will be the same. We are both very laid-back and introverted, so we have no interest in having a flashy event for a wedding. It will most likely be a small gathering of friends and family over a good meal.

To my mind, the only scam more worthy of outright contempt than the wedding industry would be the funeral business. Third place would go to beauty pageants.

I’d place “baby products” above “funeral business”, just because they only make you buy funeral supplies once.

@Seek Kolinahr REALLY? Any specifics?

@Seek_Kolinahr – I second that! I attended a baby shower last weekend, so have been spending time looking at baby registries and stores, etc.—what a racket!

@stanleybmanly

Well, for example, did you know you can’t just buy a crib and keep it for 25 years like your parents used to? Oh no. You’ll buy a crib, and then two years later it’ll be “recalled”, and they’ll change the laws so you can no longer have a drop-side crib. Or the bars have to have so much space. And did you know that old mattresses can leach chemicals that cause SIDS, so you have to have the Brand New Super Organic Bamboo Hemp Fiber-Filled MotherGoddessMattress 9000! And your old breast pump? Nope! It’s specially designed so that milk touches parts of it that can’t be sterilised, so you need to buy a new one for each kid, because ewwww… three year old crusty milk pump.

Oh, and it’s illegal to re-sell cribs and carseats now.

Did you know car seats have expiration dates? and that it’s illegal to use one past expiry? and that if you’re in an accident and the kid’s in a car seat that is expired, they can deny you insurance coverage for the accident? All true.

@Seek_Kolinahr: While that is a bit of a racket, I can almost guarantee it’s because of parents who wanted a scapegoat and a big payday because of something that happened to their child, and all this nonsense is because these companies need to protect themselves from lawsuit-happy people.

Some of it is, sure. But seriously, do we need eight billion different choices for Pack n- plays? Do we NEED Pack N. Plays? Should parents be purchasing pieces of furniture specifically designed to be completely pointless once the child is about a year old? (I’m looking at you, diaper changing tables!) or wipes warmers, or diaper genies…

If you want a real laugh, google “useless baby products”. You’ll see such gems as the “baby care timer”, in case you forgot that crying means hungry, and you need to set an alarm for every two hours. Or how about pacifier sanitizing wipes? Or the “pee pee teepee”? Or the slip-proof baby knee pads?

Wonderful! I had no idea. Isn’t commerce wonderful? No area or topic is sacrosanct when it comes to extracting money from suckers. I wonder how enforcement is applied to combat the illicit car seat, breast pump and crib cartels? What’s a “Pak n Play”?

We decided we would go for a wedding because we felt it a good excuse for a party; because we wanted to showcase our intent to share our future lives to all our friends; and because we were going on a world trip. Traveling some parts of the world as a married couple just seemed a lot easier.

Anyways, once we decided we’d marry, we also decided it had to happen sooner rather than later. As a result, we had about 6 weeks to set it all up.

Our wedding day was beautiful, we had about three hundred people come and share the day with us, the sun was shining all day and we had a great party in the evening.

Our honeymoon was a bit strange… we already planned a trip with friends, so we decided to ‘use’ that as our honeymoon. As a result we went on our honeymoon together with friends. One of them bing the ex of my wife…. The honeymoon as well as our world trip went great and we are still happily married, fifteen years later.

The fact that we spent 7 month together living from two backpacks and staying in hotels of under 10 dollar, without ever having a fallout, was a good indication that we would make it anywhere. We still feel that way.

And while we’re on the subject of useless, expensive shit, what about pet care products? I saw an ad for a bluetooth thingy that attaches to your dog’s collar so that you can see how much exercise they are getting! Who the hell cares?

@Dutchess_III ”... it wasn’t the wedding that was important, it was the marriage.”

I give that same advice to every young, engaged couple I meet. The advice isn’t solicited, and I’m sure that most couples don’t appreciate me interfering, but I say it anyway.

But it’s so very true.