Skip to main content

It's Not About the Dress

Image
By
It’s Not About The Dress 

 The wedding venue, the dress, the flowers, the photographer...when did all this get to be so important?  

Rather than making TV shows like “Say Yes to the Dress,” we would like to have a reality TV show where a young couple gets together with their parents and grandparents and they talk about the REAL stuff of life and love.  One thing is for sure… It’s not about the dress.  It’s about what to say (or NOT say) when your spouse doesn’t get home from work at the time you expected.  It’s about dirty dishes and dirty diapers.  It’s about planning holidays around two different families often hundreds of miles apart. It’s about HOW to express feelings in a healthy way.   

Rather than the perfect wedding dress, marriage is about laughing at spontaneous inside jokes with your spouse, who is also your best friend.  It’s about that knowing look and heart melting moment when after 5 or 15 or 55 years of Marriage, ‘your song’ comes on the radio. It’s also about the peace and security that overwhelms you as you lay in bed together, after an exhausting day of work and laundry and getting kids to school and practice. It’s about making many small decisions to love, every day.    

The dress doesn’t even register on a scale that measures fulfillment in married life.  Have you ever seen someone’s wedding dress on display at their 40thor 50th wedding anniversary?  It’s profound if you think about it – she said, ‘yes’ to THAT particular dress- but, imagine all the much more important ‘yeses’ she and he have said to each other over those years!  What a wonderful, complicated journey it is!  
Labels:

Comments

  1. Paul and Stephanie FrancoisJuly 7, 2018 at 8:25 AM

    YES to this nugget of wisdom and experience!

    ReplyDelete
  2. John and JulieJuly 9, 2018 at 10:05 AM

    Love, love love this, Ken & Janine! You are spot on! We write in all our engagement and wedding cards- "Enjoy this time, but remember... a wedding is a day. A marriage is a lifetime." So true.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Great Sex!

By
Sex between a married couple is not only good, it’s very good. If you read the research and surveys, you will find that married couples experience better and more frequent sex than non-married couples. Married couples are healthier, happier, and live longer. When we went on a WorldWide Marriage Encounter weekend, we were more than a little surprised when a priest told us that our love-making is good, is important for us, and is important to the world. He encouraged us to “make mad passionate love!”
    So, why has married sex become something else? Society and media portray sex for married couples as dull and lifeless, a tool used to manipulate, something to joke about, and something that - beyond the newlywed phase- gradually drifts away. We’ve been sold this bill of goods, and we often buy into it! What we really crave in our sex life is to give and receive something powerful- to experience the depths of our passion and love for each other, to be as intimate as possible. Our freq…
1 comment
Read more

Advice From a Divorce Lawyer

By
Yes, this is a strange twist.  We recently heard about James J Sexton's book, "If You're in My Office, It's Already Too Late."  James is a divorce attorney from New York, who started noticing some patterns after 20 years of working with couples whose marriages were ending.
Post a Comment
Read more

Marriage Manners Matter

By
"Fine!" and "Whatever!" These 2 powerful words have the incredible potential to bring nearly any discussion to a screeching halt.  They send the insensitive message of "I don't care. Discussion over.  Period. Full stop!"   As married couples, we have probably used these or similar words.  And, if we have raised children we have probably employed time out, taken the car keys or other forms of discipline.

Those 2 little words are not  the focus of this blog.
5 comments
Read more

Sex on Days Ending in 'Y'

By
Lovemaking is one of the most important aspects of a healthy marriage.  Yet there are so many impediments and inhibitions to making love once those wonderful Honeymoon years are over.
Post a Comment
Read more

Tone of Voice

By
Something that we’ve become increasingly aware of in our marriage is how our tone of voice so significantly affects our communication – for better or for worse! It is remarkable how something so seemingly small can make such a huge impact on whether our communication is healthy, productive, and enriching or debilitating, disheartening, and provocative. Believe it or not, tone of voice is huge. WE would go as far as to say tone of voice is at the root of most of the small hurts we experience in our relationship.
Perhaps it would be easier to make our case using an example. Recently, we were trying to get out of the house to go to church and be on time. I (Stephanie) have to admit I am typically the one who is running behind trying to get one last thing put away or rushing because I did not plan my time well. Paul will often playfully turn the hall light on and off letting me know he is by the door ready and waiting. Usually I will laugh it off and tell him I am coming. This particular…
Post a Comment
Read more