Every Wedding Is a Low-Key Funeral
Goodbye. It was a sentiment Prince Harry felt at the weddings of both his father and his brother, as he shared in his recent memoir, Spare. He wrote, “…after saying their vows, people tended to disappear.”
It felt like such a relief to hear someone say it out loud. No one really admits this, after all. We love to pretend that weddings are the beginning of absolutely everything. The first day of the couple’s happily ever after. The beginning of their family. Their first step into forever.
But after nearly half a century, I’ve found that weddings signal much less happy beginnings for those surrounding the happy couple. How many of us will still be in their lives a year, two years, five years after they say “I do?”
Or perhaps it’s more accurate to ask what’s the likelihood of them still being in our lives in the future? It’s not typical that friends or family members suddenly fade away from a married couple’s life.
It’s more like what Prince Harry noted: It’s the people saying “I do” who tend to disappear.
Ifthere’s one thing I regret in my life, it’s not (believe it or not) spending seven years with a man who ended up leaving me for a younger woman — it’s prioritizing him and our relationship above all else.
When I moved in with Lee that fateful October in 2009, my life drastically changed. His, interestingly, did not.
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