How We Took the first Big, Brave Step Towards Getting Married

You can’t get married without a date. But which date? And how do you choose from all 365 days on the calendar? The secret is, slowly. 

From the very second that man who makes great tea got down on one knee, the questions began:

When is it? Have you set a date? Are you pregnant? Have you chosen your colours? Who will be your best man? Have you got a venue? Here, I’ll tell you what to do, so just follow everything I say and you’ll have a great wedding, okay?

And most of them, while well meaning, made me want to lie down and delete almost everyone off my phonebook. But I didn’t, which is great because we would like a rowdy troop of special people to celebrate that special day with. So we did something different and took six months to pick a date. Yes, six months.

We had a general idea of when we’d like to officially commit our lives to each other in the eyes of the law, but the way we pinned down the day was the way all good things in this family happen. Slowly. It involved an intense after-dinner conversation that included not just the two of us, but my daughter too.

It’s possible the dogs chimed in too, but they’re not terribly well skilled at reading calendars and that may have been their technique for assessing a convenient cuddle break, or checking if we were distributing treats.

Now that we have a timeline to work towards, and the little things we’ve thought about relatively figured out, we’ll be setting to work on that to do list, in the way that we want to do it. Slowly, often pretending we know exactly what we’re doing, until we frustratingly admit we don’t. That’s when I’ll call my mother-in-law to be and probably ask her to plan the whole thing and send me a calendar invitation (yes, I’m looking at you, Diane).

As we threw dates into the air to find one that fits, the child who sits in the middle of our funny family offered up her thinking and joined in as we sketched out ideas and opened up our calendars to find the perfect day. The date we finally settled on has significance to all of us, and not just because it’ll be easy to remember in 40 years’ time.

While we were working towards picking it, every one of us had views and decisions to make, angling towards officially creating this family that’s been around for a long time now.

We dealt with it as we deal with any conversation topic or problem, as a trio of people somehow thrown together through life’s funny ways, each of us holding our own space in circle swirls around a golden centre of love.

And as we found the perfect date (let’s give an award to my fiancé here, because he found it first!), I swear I saw a glimpse of the future, and it was good. It was us, a little older, a little wiser and a little more lived, but there was still this family, sitting around the dinner table, fixing problems and laughing like we should.