Love and marriage

It's coming up to time for another wedding anniversary. I tried to think of a less gloomy way of saying that, because it's not intended to be gloomy at all. Does read a bit prison-ish though. But it's not. This year it will be, well, one more year than it was last year. If I've done my fingers and toes correctly, we'll have spent more of our married life in Sweden than we have in New Zealand. And that's kind of cool. Second time weddings are a bit tricky. Do you make a big deal out of it or not ? Clearly making a big deal out of the first wedding wasn't such a smart idea. In the end, I think we found the perfect mix which pretty much summed up the things that we have most in common.

Planning a trans hemisphere is pretty much impossible. If you have it in one country, you effectively shut out one side of the family. It's not fair nor reasonable to ask Aunt Maud to spend a month's salary to fly halfway around the world just so that you can have someone else admire at your flash new clothes for 5 minutes. One family ends up losing in the deal. Having both been previously married, we had moved on from the Big Fat Greek Wedding scenario. Marriage takes on a different pespective when you've spent more years than you should have being married to the reincarnation of the devil him/her self. This time around we both understood what was important about the day and, just as importantly, what wasn't important.

My wife and I are habitual ditherers. Maybe that is the attraction. It takes us forever to decide on anything. In our defense, once we do decide, it works out to be a bloody good decision. We do have to force the process, however. Once a year we plonk ourselves down in front of the computer and we're not allowed to stand up until we've booked our annual summer holidays. If we didn't do that, we'd still be pondering over travel magazines 12 months later. We organised our wedding exactly the same way. The family issue was tough. Sweden= annoying NZ family members. NZ= annoying Swedish family members. The solution was simple. Go somewhere in the middle and offend both sides of the family equally. No favourites. And so we did. We sat down on a Saturday afternoon and wrote emails to four or five hotels on various South Pacific islands who specialised in weddings. The rule was simple. Whomever replied first, got the job.

Once again the system triumphed. We found us a great resort on a little island who planned the whole thing for us. A few click of a mouse, and a 15 minute meeting once we arrived, and one wedding was planned to perfection. And all for less thean the price of a typical wedding bar tab. It was a perfect day, just the 2 of us (and a few hotel guests who happened to be wandering past on the beach at the time) in a perfect place, and I don't think we would have changed a thing. We even managed to avoid a tropical cyclone by a couple of hours.

Racking up another year is a big achievement these days. I try not to look back at how many years I have wasted, although I suspect that I'm a better person today for having that miserable life. Rather, or maybe because of that, I'm a little more thankful every day for the life that I have today. Good things can happen to bad people.