As I said in my intro, two years ago I’d never been to a wedding, well at least not one that I was old enough to remember. But when my brother and his long term partner announced that they were getting married I got pretty excited. When they announced they would be getting married in Mauritius I got REALLY excited!
In fact it was a wedding in two parts: the first an intimate family wedding at an incredible all-inclusive resort in Mauritius, the second a more traditional reception for their friends in their fantastic home town of York. When I was asked to be one of two best men I felt an interesting mix of great honour and great fear…ok, mostly fear. However when I was told the other best man would be delivering the best man speech at the York reception everything swung right back to the honoured side! It was an amazing wedding, but maybe we’ll talk about that some other time. The point is, that was my first wedding experience and a brilliant one at that! Little did I know that the wedding floodgates were about to open.
It’s funny, all those years without a single wedding and then suddenly practically everyone I knew started getting married all at once. Dom takes wedding photos for a living but I swear at one stage I was going to more than she was! Every other weekend I seemed to be jumping in the car to another part of the country and celebrating another magical day. Don’t get me wrong, my friends are hugely important to me and I wouldn’t miss their wedding day for anything. They were all really special in their own ways, but could they not have spaced them out a little? I’m not the only one who’s found this: apparently I have officially entered “the wedding phase”. It’s a magical time where everyone you know will indeed get married, and is the precursor to the “baby phase” which is both amazing and frankly terrifying.
Anyway, alongside going to all of these weddings as a guest I also started helping out a little with Dom’s business. She’s not foolish enough to let me loose behind a camera but I did end-up taking her all over the place and helping to set up for…you guessed it…more weddings! It’s amazing how individual each wedding was and the little stories that help it to stand out in your memory, the unique features that make the day. However, there was one thing that remained consistent in each and every wedding I went to; a question asked of me by everyone I spoke to:
“So when are you going to pop the question?”
Now I’ve always believed firmly in marriage and have known for a long time that Dom was the girl I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, but I wasn’t about to be pressured into asking before the time was right for us. I had a plan, a plan I was going to follow through. I knew when and how I was going to propose and until then I wasn’t letting on, not to anyone. Well, almost anyone. But that’s a tale for another post.
The point is that we’re a real bride and groom and, though between us we’ve been to hundreds of weddings, we actually, against all the odds, still FRICKING LOVE THEM! On this blog we’ll tell you all about our wedding plans as we make them, the trials and tribulations, the excitement and the endless, continuous (often one sided) conversations about venues, seating plans, maps of the seating plans, drawings of maps of the seating plans, crossed out drawings of maps of the seating plans, revised version 482 of seating plan B (although will that person really get-on with that person?) and of course tablecloths. Seriously. Tablecloths. Surely a tablecloth’s a tablecloth…no? I can see this is going to be a looooooooong journey.
