#56. Am I supposed to feel different now?

I don’t feel any different after getting married a month ago. Is that bad?

Three and a half weeks ago, Paul and I got married. Since then, we made super spicy Thai food for Christmas (which we spent by ourselves), threw a big New Year’s Eve party at our house, watched a ton of Battlestar Galactica, and both got some slightly disappointing work news. Paul went back to work weeks ago, and I went back yesterday after a long break for dead week, which I spent plowing through A Court of Mist and Fury and making major headway on A Court of Wings and Ruin. The question we’ve both started wondering is: Are we supposed to feel different now?

Popular wedding rhetoric says that yes, marriage changes things. People have a lot to say in general about what we’re supposed to feel, think, or do as we approach and achieve certain life milestones like marriage. Recently we’ve heard that getting married makes you feel/act/think differently from some of our friends and family, read about it online, and questioned what “feeling different” actually means. Personally, I think most of these might be bullshit.

While neither of us can say for sure how we’ll feel one, five, or ten years from now (and we’ll never know how we would have felt in an alternate timeline where we stayed together but didn’t get married), I came across an article from Martha Stewart Weddings the other day which states that three emotions that are totally normal to feel in the month after your wedding are sadness, deeper love and pride, and pressure about what’s next. Our month is almost up, and I can’t say I really feel any of these. Am I supposed to? (And with something so vastly complex as being a human in our strange world, who’s even to say?)

Let’s consider sadness. This is mostly about feeling a major comedown from the wedding, which I think is actually understandable, considering how long couples often spend planning their wedding (ours was just over a year; exactly average). Psychology Today says that brides who are unhappy in the aftermath of their weddings often see the wedding itself as the end goal of all that planning, whereas happier brides see it as the beginning of a new chapter.

I haven’t felt any post-wedding comedown blues, but I’d have to put myself in both of these categories. Our wedding was amazing, but I actually feel a little lighter now that the wedding is over since there was so much planning and small details to take care of, and it was truly taking up a ton of my time.

Throwing a really special event to bring all our people together to celebrate love–both ours and just the cosmic nature of it all–was absolutely part of why we wanted to get married, but we’re both also happy that it’s over and we can just go back to regular life now. Absolutely would do it again, but it is a little surprising how fast it all felt for how much planning went into it. But we did it! And we both feel absolutely fantastic about how well it went, instead of being sad that it’s over. We watched the first draft of our wedding video last week and we both cried! In the type of way where now we can just enjoy the memories and actually see and experience the parts of our ceremony we mentally blacked out (did that happen to anyone else???)

Do I feel deeper in love now? Maybe… but honestly not really? I feel fairly confident that our love will deepen over time, but our vows were mostly about the already-existing depth, intensity, and ease of our connection, which has deepened a little bit every day for the past two and a half years. The week right after the wedding I felt like we were floating in a bubble of positivity, happiness, and support radiating from the people we love, but it popped when Paul went to build a yurt with friends near the border of Canada just a few days after we returned to Minnesota and came home with a stomach bug, haha. That’s real life for you.

Regarding feeling deeper in love in the first month after the wedding, Martha Stewart says, "It might be that moment after your first post-married argument when you realize that neither of you are going anywhere or that deep sense that this person has become more than your partner. They're now your family, and you'll feel pride that they're your spouse."

I mean, I guess I have some problems with this statement. Shouldn’t you already feel this way before getting married? When you’re in the right partnership, marriage shouldn’t be the thing to make you feel pride in your relationship or that “neither of you are going anywhere,” in my opinion. Did you know it’s estimated that about 22% of marriages end within the first five years? Is that because some people expect too much from marriage and are disappointed when nothing changes? Is it possible to go into a marriage “unaware” that divorce is an option that exists?

I was 100% committed to a life with Paul before our wedding, and I’m 100% committed now. And I feel like I can really say that because I was engaged to someone else years ago and never felt that way. Marriage didn’t change that; finding the right partner did. One of the things that has made this partnership different from any other I’ve been in is that fighting–at any point in our relationship, even in the early stages–has always felt safe. Arguments or differences of opinion have never felt like a threat to our stability, and we got through our first (and only) post-wedding fight just like every other that came before it. We’re boring!

As far as feeling pressure about what’s next, I wonder if that applies more to newly married people who are younger than we are, or people who are either undecided or already know they want to have kids. Totally get it if that’s the case. Since Paul and I have known for years at this point that we don’t want kids, and bought a house together two years ago, I feel zero pressure about what’s next for us. We’re both working individually and together on our careers, which I can already predict will be a huge focus for us in the next 3-5 years. I think a majority of our friends and family know about our childfree4ever status at this point, so I don’t feel any external pressure, either, and no one is asking when we’ll have kids. Even my new gynecologist didn’t question me at all when I told her we intend to remain childfree. And I feel really really good about that.

So all in all, no–I don’t feel any different now that I’m married. At least not yet. And I’m not convinced that I should. I think it’s fine if you do, but equally as fine if you don’t. I think we put a lot of pressure on both weddings and marriages to go a certain way or mean a certain thing. Maybe we all get to decide what exactly each means to us, and set our own expectations accordingly.

So tell me–did you feel different right after getting married? Did marriage change anything for you? Did you feel sadness, pride, or pressure in the month right after your wedding? Come discuss in the comments!

K bye,
Kelly