Before You Walk Down That Aisle.....

I went to a wedding shower yesterday for one of my husband’s 116 cousins.
(I’m not making this up, he really does have a whole whack of first cousins, so spread out in age that some are grandparents and some are still in high school. This is due to the fact that his grandparents were all married twice, and in a small town, and the combinations of progeny has resulted in the fact that all of them are now related to each other. I can’t explain it to you because I can barely keep it straight in my own head. Suffice it to say, you can’t swing a dead cat in the Mister’s hometown without hitting one of his relatives. )

Anyway, at the shower the guests were given a little piece of paper whereby we were to give the bride a bit of pithy advice on how to make for a happy marriage. (A dangerous game, this….I’d have never approved this at one of my own wedding showers. How do you know the anonymous advice isn’t going to be “run for your life” or “get a different groom”?) I wrote down something not too sappy that I read in a greeting card once.

It made me think about marriages and how they work and why some work and some don’t…it’s a tenuous business. I’m certainly no expert on the subject and I’m no psychologist, but I am a hairdresser, and spend a great deal of my day wondering "WTF?"at the Buick-sized holes in some people's logic. Some people really are just hear to serve as a warning to others.

So, after fifteen years of my own wedded bliss, not to mention 25 years dealing with brides at the salon, I think I may have a few rules to guide the new bride and groom.
1. Marry someone you like. This might seem like a ridiculous truism, but honestly, you’d be surprised at how many couples I meet that don’t seem to like each other very much. When the bride is talking about what an idiot the groom is in the chair on her wedding day, you’ve got to wonder about the long term viability here.
2. Marry someone you like as they are. He’s not going to change after the wedding. He’ll like the same friends as he does now, dress the same way and be enchanted by the same mind-numbing tv. And, news flash? You’re not going to change much, either.
3. Marry someone who gets along with his family. This is a fairly important relationship in anyone’s life, and if he (or you) has a rocky and turbulent connection to his parents and siblings, chances are he’s going to have the same dynamics with you eventually, too. He doesn’t have to adore them or even like them very much; he has to be able to be in the same room with them without flying into a blind rage.
4. Marry someone who’s past it just that. Everyone has some emotional luggage they carry around with them; hopefully they’ve learned from it and moved on. If you have someone who continually brings up that bitch he used to date or suffers from Post Traumatic High School Disorder, then you’re going to be dealing with those for a lo-o-o-o-ong time. And you can also tell a lot about a person by how they treat their ex.
5. Marry someone you actually know. Never walk down the aisle with someone who has been in your life for less than a year, whose family you have not met or who has to ask what your middle name is. You should have traveled together, decorated a Christmas tree, hung wallpaper and seen each other with a raging hangover and/or headcold.
6. Never settle. Marry someone that you think is the greatest thing on God’s green earth. You may not spend every day thinking he is the culmination of thousands of years of evolution, but you really should be able to think it once in a while. And he should think the same of you.

Marriage is the combination of two messy, complicated and usually selfish lives, no wonder so many of them go belly up. I suppose the real secret to a good marriage is compatibility, which boils down to the best advice I could have given the bride: Marry the right person.

It’s as easy and as complicated as that.