Love to Emily&Alex

There is that bit about “bad times” in the wedding vows, but it almost sounds like a good luck charm.  What bad times...??  You are getting married!!!  

There may be a clandestine tuck though, a whisper, a last piece of advice given.  But in general we like to think of a wedding as a magical event not to be spoiled by reality.  

Here are my few bites of advice as I have rounded the corner of our second decade together:

Don’t fool yourself.  Love is a chemical cocktail that can leave you with a serious hangover at the other end of married life.

That feeling of profound connection  triggered by a potent potion of happy hormones, which are generously disbursed when we  encounter the one we have longed for all that time, may in fact hold a secret by-product:  familiarity - as in "It seems like I have known him forever..."

True.  

After all, the person you will fall in love with is likely to combine the best and the worst of your parent-child moments.  

It may not be at all obvious at first or even after twenty years, but marriage will reveal - to the ones who dare look - the entire list of hopes and disappointments we had buried in the depth of some mental drawer while growing up.  

Marriage will provide the time to open it up again and to take a good long look inside.

On the bright side, falling in love means that we connect with someone, because somehow we feel that we have found the closest expression of our first love relationship - just better - or so we hope!  

On the murkier side, we may never find what we are looking for and generously distribute blame in all directions.  Drawer shut, key tossed.

At the best, however, marriage is a joint plunge into the entrails of childhood hopes, frustrations and coping mechanism.  After some soul searching it may very well provide some clues to why we are the way we are and why we do the things we do and also why we chose each other.  At least that's what I am working on.  

My advice: have your parachute ready and 
don´t worry to take the leap.  After all, working it out together can be good fun!