Witnessing a 50-year marriage
On love, choices and letting go of the things that will never be
There’s a type of quote that does the rounds to make people feel good and special about their existence, along the lines of think about the millions of choices that mean you exist! The stardust in our bones! The probability of THAT sperm! That egg!
I’m not sure why this quote has never sat well with me or moved me in the way it is intended. Perhaps because I find it mildly mawkish. It is the kind of quote that tries to make sense of the random, to make us feel there is a benign facet to fate in a world that also produces monsters. Perhaps because, instead of providing comfort, it reminds me of the tenuousness of my place in things, that depending on a choice as thin as a papercut, I might not have existed.
A few weeks ago, I came close to understanding the immensity of this concept. It was a late September afternoon in Kent. Although Autumn was a while off, the leaves still holding tightly onto the trees, there was a chill in the air as myself, my sister and sixty guests watched my parents dance in their back garden at their 50th wedding anniversary to their favourite song: Ed Sheeran’s Perfect.
Until the day itself, we had spent the last six months caught up in the tornado of my mother’s party planning. There were many conversations about whether to have it in a hall or their house, caterers or making the food ourselves. Who would provide the music? Make speeches? Do we need a marquee? Who is in charge of balloons?
In the final 24 hours, my sister and I ran around on my mother’s orders – a thing we did willingly because we understood that how we got married was not how our parents got married, and that perhaps my mother was owed this.
When they married in 1974, they were on a shoestring budget. There was no hen do, stag do, expensive dress, live band, stately home, three-tier cake, sugared almonds, or flutes of champagne. They had little choice in anything – it was not their special day, it was a day for their families.
When my sister and I watched our parents dance, my father’s hand gently on my mother’s back, she looking up at him, her curly hair a halo against the sun, one of my mother’s friends said to me: “What was the song for their first dance at their wedding?”
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