Here’s a slightly random fact about me: I’ve written something for five different weddings now, from poems and readings to vows for both brides and grooms.
This past weekend, I got to write and read a piece for a couple at their wedding. I liked how it turned out, so I thought I’d share it with you.
Enjoy!
The Ordinary Work of Love
Look around for a moment. Today is wonderfully extravagant.
People have travelled to be here. Everyone is dressed better than usual. There are flowers, photographs, speeches, and months of planning hidden inside details most of us will never notice.
And at the centre are two people standing before everyone they love and saying,
“I choose you.”
Love deserves days like this.
The trouble is, life doesn’t contain many of them.
It does, however, contain an astonishing number of Tuesdays.
Tuesday is deciding what to have for dinner.
Tuesday is spending twenty minutes choosing a film, then both falling asleep before the ending.
Tuesday is an inside joke nobody else understands.
Tuesday is someone leaving something where it does not belong and the other just moving it.
Tuesday is an argument that will seem ridiculous by Friday.
Tuesday is hearing the key turn in the door and knowing what kind of day they’ve had.
Sometimes Tuesday is nothing much at all.
Work. Dinner. A little TV. Bed.
And sometimes, somehow, Tuesday is everything at once.
Then Tuesday comes again.
And again.
Most of these moments will never be photographed. Nobody will applaud them. You may not even remember them.
But I think this is where the enormous things we say today acquire their meaning.
Today, “I choose you” is a declaration.
On Tuesday, it may simply mean:
“I made you a cup of tea.”
Today, “sharing a life” sounds enormous.
On Tuesday:
“You look tired. I’ve got this one.”
And “I know you” may one day mean hearing the front door close and knowing whether to ask a question, offer a massage or simply make room beside you.
But even that knowing cannot stay still.
The person standing beside you today will change.
So will you.
Dreams change. Ambitions change. Things you once stayed awake talking about may fade, while things you could never imagine caring about today become the centre of your world.
The strange privilege of loving someone for a long time is that the person you know best never quite stops becoming someone new.
So love cannot only say,
“I know you.”
Sometimes it must also say,
“Tell me who you are now.”
And perhaps this is the ordinary work of love: to keep noticing, to keep laughing, to let small things stay small, to carry more when the other has less, to remember that you are on the same side, and through thousands of ordinary moments to remain someone the other still wants to move toward.
Perhaps an extraordinary marriage is simply what happens when two people become very good at the ordinary work of love.
So, groom and bride, I wish you extraordinary days. Days like today. I hope you have many.
But even more than that,
I wish you a lifetime of very good Tuesdays.
PS: Of course, I didn’t say “groom and bride” 😅
Beautiful piece and really does give a glimpse what love is