the luck of marriage

today, i’m thinking about marriage.

last year, my wife and i tied the knot. it was an interesting experience for me, as i’d always been one of those who thought he’d spend the rest of his life alone. every relationship i’ve had has been a twisted disaster. sure, some of them had their moments, but more often than not they became a torturous entanglement of bitterness, nostalgia and a deathly grip on unfulfilled expectations for both involved. i reasoned there was something deeply wrong with me.

oh, i haven’t changed my mind on that – there really is something deeply wrong with me, as any of my friends could tell you – it’s just that i was lucky enough to find someone who managed to shine a light into that grubby little corner and shrug it off with a “nothing so disturbing there.”

i met my wife a few weeks after starting at my latest job. when i arrived, i was a whirlwind of chaos and despair layered in sheets of desperation which kept me clinging to the remote corners of my sanity. in the previous year i’d suffered rejection, loss, and a battering to my ego which i never thought would heal. looking back, i firmly believe this to be a good thing. you see, i’m the kind of person who has never once asked a girl out. i’m far too shy and far too reserved. often, i spend so much time thinking about it that when i finally feel i might summon up the minerals to ask her, i find she’s just gotten engaged to a six foot tall tattooed biker lord from hell who thinks she’s a terrific bit of stress relief and the bruises she’s hiding are merely expressions of love and affection.

however, after quickly falling into the ritual of visiting her in her bakery, i realised i was feeling rather positive about this overwhelming smile machine i’d see every day. i began to look forward to that few seconds where she would be smiling at me instead of some other customer. so, i wrote my phone number on a little card and put it in my pocket to give her.

where it stayed for three days.

finally, after reminding myself of my previous errors, i managed to summon up my minerals and give them a good shake before expressing an interest in, you know, lunch or something. movie, maybe? yes? no? umm, should i run away before you call the cops?

shockingly, she agreed. we spent the first day seeing the harry potter movie which had come out at the time, and visiting a vietnamese restaurant for lunch and then extending it to dinner before i walked her home and spent the next two hours going home from the other side of the city… a small note on the vietnamese restaurant: it was her idea to go there. i presumed it was a favourite of hers, so ate the meal without revealing the fact that i’d been to that particular restaurant three times before and absolutely hated it. they gave me an avocado thickshake instead of a pineapple something i’d ordered, too. i told her i enjoyed my meal (and drank my avocado thickshake), because i didn’t want to upset her. she told me later, with a giggle, that she took me there only because it was the only place she’d ever been to since coming to perth.

we married a year and a half later, with a few close friends for company. i don’t have a relationship with my family, so had to rely on a pilot friend of mine to be in australia at just the right time to be my best man – which he was. he was the biggest support i had through the day, and we’re hoping to jaunt off to singapore later this year to see him hitched.

we were both nervous on the day, and i will remember always how her hands shook and she looked like someone who thought she should run away but couldn’t get her legs to work. lucky for me, she was bullied into writing on the dotted line and the rest is history.

after the ceremony, we went to get our photos taken. it was an adventure. i had never liked photos, and my wife is the same. we’re just not big on them. but we thought it was a special occaision, so wanted to get a nice album of us on the day, so we went to studio and did the thing. our photographer was exactly what i thought a photographer would be – a sleazy self-obsessed creature who most likely took photos for porn mags.

our wedding day was made surreal by this man prancing around us demanding we take our clothes off and do some nude shots. we pointed out three times that we weren’t interested, but he wasn’t taking no for an answer. my wife eventually pretended she couldn’t understand english, and i just grinned at him like an idiot and tried not to thwack him in the head. in the end, i noticed the majority of our wedding shots weren’t so much of us but of my wife. he’d spent more time squeezing his zoom lens up against her face than i spend staring at her. i did get a decent amount of gorgeous photos of her, for sure, but it’s not an experience i think we’ll be trying anywhere in the future within australia. despite his disappointment at not getting a look at my wife in the nude, he managed to encourage us to build a choice of photographs until we had 15 of them.

then he hit us with the price.

for fifteen hundred bucks (the cheapest option), we got fifteen weenie little photos just a little bit bigger than a pocket calculator. that’s it.

my friend is getting two days worth of portrait shots (indoor and outdoor), a complete video of the ceremony, two framed portraits for his wall (uber large size to creep out visitors with), digital copies of all photos taken, and all that for under a third of what we paid for. that’s just criminal. i’ve asked my wife if we should move overseas. everything seems cheaper overseas. my friends are mostly from malaysia and singapore, and they’re always grinning at the prices of things here in australia. my wife, too, is always shocked. she’s currently upset about bank fees. in korea, she says, they’re not allowed to charge fees. and i see her point. our banks take our money, and they invest it to make profit, and then they charge us for the privilege of them making money from our money? huh? where’s the logic in that? my wife was equally disturbed to learn she’s made a grand total of eight dollars interest on her savings account. she believed they weren’t paying her interest payments and had to do a doublecheck to realise it’s just the banks here don’t like us very much. that eight dollars, by the way, was pretty much removed the next day in bank fees…

needless to say, we endured our sleazy creepy photographer, and enjoyed a fine evening with friends in a pleasant restaurant, and went onward with our lives.

i’m thinking about this day because my wife and i have had a bit of a crushing year in regard to our finances. we’re not quite as ahead as we’d wanted to be. australia has a habit of sucking cash from your pockets any way it can – especially in perth. i’m thinking about our marriage because, quite honestly it’s the best thing i have and makes all these other despairs seem so small.

Tags: home, wedding