paper

amazingly, it was nearly a year ago (16th feb to be exact), on a chilly but bright winter morning when i got zipped into a vintage 70s white dress, put on my new strand of pearls, slipped into my 3-inch heels, put a borrowed hairclip into my straightened hair, and got married in the centre of london.

i probably (somewhat foolishly) hadn’t given full and exhaustive consideration before i got married that it is an act of making a new family where there is no blood connection. you are tied to another, someone who biologically would not normally have the inclination to care for you year-on-year, through the good and the bad -- what a strange and beautiful concept, if you really think about it.

i used to think this was a bad thing -- needing a piece of paper to tell you to care about someone -- but now i realize perhaps this view was a bit ungenerous and certainly unnecessarily unromantic. getting married (an amazingly easy and quick process) is like getting a new birth certificate -- something that says, congratulations, you’ve chosen to be born into a new family; please take good care of each other.

i know i’ve always been head-strong and independent, and i would have thought in my early 20s that this meant i could do it all better on my own -- no consulting someone else for their opinion, or feeling embarrassed when i cause someone else to be held up. but when i think back to the happiest (or best) moments in my life, they have always involved other people: laughing over a meal with friends, the chaos of family gatherings, a walk on a nice day hand-in-hand.

i never understood until coming to london that meeting people you connect with in any significant way is truly a very very rare thing. london is a notoriously difficult city anyway, regardless if you’re a foreigner or english. i suppose i was spoiled early in my life, in both my birth city and my situation, and maybe it’s a bit late to be appreciating it now -- but i think, in a way, this realization must have helped me to decide the importance of taking that leap a year ago.

anyway, in the lead up to v-day, try to think of something nice to do for your honey -- whether your honey is your other half, a treasured friend, a rarely-seen family member, or just the lovely city you live in -- because none of those things should be taken for granted.