kay, all my newly married friends, let's talk about that age-old myth known as "newlywed bliss." We all want it and expect it, and sure, married life can be pretty wonderful, but all this bliss stuff is a little too Cinderella for my taste.
Don't get me wrong: the honeymoon is blissful. The first few times you're called "Mr. and Mrs.," your stomach does a few flips – the novelty of a new name makes you feel giddy, like a little girl playing house in her mommy's old pumps.
But the bubble usually bursts one or two glorious weeks later, when your plane touches down back home without any fanfare and your boss greets you at work on Monday morning with neither lei nor champagne. You look down at your left ring finger to make sure there are still two rings there. You inspect your reflection in the mirror to ensure that certain glow is still about you, but, rather than a twinkle in your eye or a spring in your step, it turns out to be nothing more than strawberry-daiquiri and chocolate-truffle induced love handles. Life's moving on, and suddenly you're no longer the belle of the ball, sister. You are a Married Woman.
The reality of this sent me reeling for a good three weeks. After every last gift had trickled in and the few straggling thank-you cards had been mailed out, I was left feeling a vast emptiness inside where all things big, sparkly and white had once been. Gone was the excitement of an upcoming dress fitting. No longer did I have an excuse for twice-weekly manicures and biweekly massages?
All I was left with was a joint bank account, which automatically squelched my fantasies of spending absurd sums of money drowning my sorrows in mocha-mud wraps and sloughing off my sadness in a Vichy shower. (No self-respecting wife is willing to reveal the abhorrent amounts of money she spends on nurturing her grandiose Princess Delusions, is she? Not within the first few weeks of marriage, she isn't!) Despite my intense desire to call my best friends (the girls who had silently endured being collectively referred to as "Bridesmaids" for an entire year), panic-stricken over the absence of me-based events, I realized I no longer had the right to call them, hysterical, without being told to shut the hell up. Once the wedding is over, you're expected to become normal again. Crazed, egocentric phone calls are not normal. At least, not post-wedding.
I found myself pacing the house aimlessly after work, flopping numbly onto the couch, only to sit straight up 30 minutes later, sure I'd forgotten something. Didn't I have a phone call to make? An appointment to confirm? Something to be sized or ordered or monogrammed or tasted? When I realized I'd been tragically wrong – none of those things needed doing, and I'd resume my previous position on couch, dejected by this realization.
In all fairness, I had read about this. "Be ready for my post-wedding depression," I'd warned my new hubby playfully, as we basked in the goodness of Hawaii. And we laughed. Real life felt so far away. We were both saturated in the bliss that was our honeymoon that coming down from our private pink newlywed cloud seemed impossible.
I should have known – nothing's impossible. When I finally crashed, I crashed hard, and the worst part was I didn't have any married friends to guide me through it. This was my first painful dose of the lesson I call: Being a Newlywed Is Not Being a Bride.
It's a hard lesson, but one almost every woman eventually learns. I'm no expert on marriage, but being one of the more dramatic people you'll ever meet, I figure I'm just as good as the next girl when it comes to heeding advice on overcoming your own personal Post Wedding Slump. If I can do it, you can, too, Princess Bride!
I can't stress how important it is to talk to your husband if and when this strange disorder sets in. Chances are, he wasn't as immersed in linen colors and cocktail-napkin sizes as you were, so he's better able to take this whole marriage thing in stride. (After all, he's the one who asked you, so it can't be that big a shocker to him that he's gone and got hitched.) If you don't confide in him about your feelings of loneliness now that your girlfriends aren't obligated to take an hour off work to accompany you to the stationery store, you'll end up bottling up your feelings and becoming resentful your husband has transitioned so easily while you're left in his dust, grappling alone. So, talk to him!
Initially (as in, the first two hours spent at home post-honeymoon, until I sat him down and explained using diagrams and citing sources), my husband had a difficult time grasping why I felt so empty after saying "I do." I think he, too, expected the elusive-yet-much-touted "blissful" feelings to emit from his new bride like radioactive waves. Alas, it was not to be (not yet, anyway), and together we decided the transition from Fantastical Honeymoon World to Reality had been a bit too "crash and burn" and not "gently descending from a pink puffy cloud" enough for our taste.
We decided, less talk, more action! We hit Target and bought Gardenia- and Plumeria-scented candles. We played the CD of traditional Hawaiian music we'd bought in Maui. We cuddled together on the couch, surrounded by the smells and sounds of Hawaii, and pored over our 120 exquisite photographs together.
It worked. Immersing ourselves in our own private piece of Hawaii helped soothe the burn. We sprinkled our apartment with souvenirs – a coffee-table book, the leis we'd preserved, a cookbook – things that magically whisked us away to the Napali Coast and Mauna Loa, even on the briskest Monday evening. I wouldn't allow myself to wallow. Wallowing is not part of the therapy. If I caught either of us wallowing, it was taken as a sign we weren't ready yet, and all things honeymoon were hidden until we refused to let ourselves dwell sadly on the fact that we just weren't there anymore.
Ditto our wedding day itself. We dove into our professional photos online, played our wedding song and danced in the living room, read our vows to each other again. It's pretty damn beautiful to read your vows in no makeup and sweats and realize the words ring just as true as they did the day you looked like a perfume ad in Vogue – maybe even more true since it's just the two of you saying them. We practiced saying "my wife" and "my husband" to each other while keeping straight faces. (The novelty of saying "my husband" hasn't worn off for me yet, six months later, but he's adjusted to the W word without so much as a snicker. Big showoff.)
I think the most wonderful post-wedding realization for me was that now, all of a sudden, I'd been unburdened of a million little stressors. Gone were the days of being pulled 50 different directions (cake one way, dress the other, favors over there). All the days spent planning for our union as husband and wife were over, and what was I left with? Exactly that – our union! I had all these long, empty afternoons and weekends to spend just with him. No pesky wedding planner, no demanding in-laws, no tearful bridesmaids – just he and I. We really began to enjoy and indulge in having that time to do whatever we pleased.
We're both foodies, so we've taken to finding difficult exotic recipes and cooking them together: Indian, Japanese, Thai, etc. We take great pleasure in traveling to different supermarkets just to find the right ingredients, then spending hours together laboring in the kitchen.
When things start feeling stagnant, we pick something new to look forward to. A date night on an upcoming weekend, inviting our newly married friends over (this one is always quite fun – a couple bottles of wine, some mini quiches, and you nearly feel like a grown up!), a weekend trip (OK, we still haven't quite scraped up the funds to do this one, but we have a lot of fun sitting around planning it), a house guest, a concert, and so on.
I've found without the constant presence of looming appointments and expectations, I'm left with an abundance of free time to do whatever I want. With my husband. And both of us have found what we want isn't that much, only to talk about us, our marriage. Sometimes, we spend Saturday morning entangled in each other's limbs on the sofa talking about our dream life – our corner penthouse with a giant garden (it's in Manhattan, and it never rains), our kids and/or expensive spa-treatment habit, our highly respected but extremely flexible careers, our jet-setting lifestyle and chronic tans.
Life won't be bad, we agree.
And you know, when I look at my husband and I decked out in terrycloth bathrobes on our hand-me-down couch, surrounded by photos of all our friends and family gathered together on our wedding day, smiling just for us, with cheap wine in the fridge and a list of things to do together tacked outside (Home Depot is almost always near the top), and loved by our three furry, four-legged, quite-demanding "children," I think, life isn't bad right now, after all.
After the sparkles, limo, horse-drawn carriage, pin-spot lighting, imported orchids and bubbles have worn off, you're left sitting with your best friend, an entire lifetime stretched out in front of you to do whatever you please, together. (Having cabinets full of gorgeous new appliances, dishes and stemware to do it with doesn't hurt, either.) Now isn't that the real point of a wedding?
Okay, all my newly married friends, let's talk about that age-old myth known as "newlywed bliss." We all want it and expect it, and sure, married life can be pretty wonderful, but all this bliss stuff is a little too Cinderella for my taste.
Speed Dating
