Weddings, marriage and the great wedding dress hunt.

Strangely, I spent much of last weekend wedding dress shopping.
I say " strangely," because I know nothing about wedding dresses.
Our wedding wasn't the kind that needed a dreamy dress.
But one of my friends is getting married next year and Chichester is a good place to start  "the great-wedding dress-hunt." because it has lots of wedding dress shops, all very close together.
So despite my complete lack of experience, knowledge or expertise, I became my friend's wedding dress guide for the day.
I was looking forward to it.
Sitting, watching and subjectively advising is the easy party.
Trying on hundreds of dresses, each one fitted and flowing with miles of fabric, is the hard part.
But even I felt overwhelmed when we walked into the first shop and were greeted by  oceans of silk, miles of satin and a forest of lace and netting.

Where do you begin? 
How can you find out what style you need or what shade of white is best?
How do you know whether you need your dress to be boned or corseted, body-hugging or meringue-skirted? 
" Let me just talk you through our shop," said the first smiling assistant, greeting us at the door.
And immediately I could tell, this wasn't going to be the easy, laid-back, fun-filled  day I had imagined..
Because if you have to begin by being  "talked through," a tiny shop, down a narrow side-street in a small city, things are only going to get more complicated!
My friend, on the other hand, seemed completely unfazed by the unending choice of dresses or the complicated styles or the wedding dress lingo.
"These ones at the front of the shop are the designers with the longest lead time," explained the assistant.
" What's lead time?" I asked.
The assistant cast me a pitying look and my friend a sympathetic glance.
" The amount of time it takes for the dress to be ordered and arrive in the shop," she explained patiently." Now towards the back it's a bit shorter.  And then there's the fitting time to be factored in. Tell me again, when are you getting married?"
My friend gave her the date - about a year from now.
The assistant sucked in her breath thoughtfully, 
" You might still have just enough time," she said.
I almost fell over.
For someone, like me who usually plans what they are going to wear two minutes before they leave the house, the thought of having to plan what you will be wearing in a year's time is a hard concept to grasp.
My friend took the news bravely and began to browse through the rails of taffeta and frills and ivory silk.
And somehow, from the impossibly huge number of dresses, she managed to choose six.
" Don't worry," said her personal assistant comfortingly, " it's a start!"
While my friend  stepped in and out of fairy-tale dresses, I sat on a comfortable sofa, watching and listening and struggling to keep a grasp on reality.
Behind every changing-room curtain, brides-to-be were being helped on and off with dresses.
When they emerged, they would walk past me with a rustle of netting and a swirl of silk and survey themselves critically in a full-length mirror. 
it began to feel as though I had stepped into a world peopled only by princesses and me.
And everyone looked beautiful-whatever their size or shape or style.
Because isn't that the thing about wedding dresses?
For just one day in our often very ordinary lives,they make us feel that we are someone special and important and beautiful.
For just one day we live the fairy-tale dream.
And it works.
Every time my friend walked through the changing room curtain, she looked amazing..
But I'm not sure that was because of the dress.
I think maybe it was the flush of happiness and the thrill of excitement.
I hope it was because she's looking forward to marrying the man she loves. 

According to the office of National Statistics, every hour in England in 2012, thirteen couples got divorced.
Most divorces happen in the first ten years of marriage.
So as I sat in that " land of taffeta and lace,"  I couldn't help wondering if maybe we should be spending less time searching for the perfect dress and more time checking that we have really found the perfect partner.
Of course none of us ever know what will happen in the future, our hearts are " daft," and unpredictable, but it can be easy to get swept up in the excitement of a wedding and forget that what you are doing is getting married.
And that means committing yourself to another human being for the rest of your life: for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health.
A complete giving of yourself.
It's hard to imagine what that really means.
Marriage is an enormous thing to contemplate.
Never again in your life will you have to make such a huge decision.
Yet people spend more time choosing dresses and venues and cakes than truly contemplating the journey they are about to embark on when they say the words: " I do."
It's something Ninesh and I were thinking about slightly nervously on the drunken night before we got married.
We were in a bar in New York.

The Kettle of Fish, New York

  
Our witness, the only person who knew about our plan,  is gay and so it was a gay bar 
( always the best bars in New York).
Mostly it was full of gay men.
" What are you doing?" they asked Ninesh,crowding around him supportively.
" Celebrating," explained Ninesh, " we're getting married tomorrow."
" That's what we mean," chorused his audience, " what are you doing? Why are you marrying a woman?"
" I tried it once," said one of them, catching hold of his boyfriend's hand, " biggest mistake i ever made. Don't do it"
Have you really thought this through?" asked another.
" Have another shot, why don't you," they said, calling the waiter over, " it might help you change your mind, see things more clearly."
But many shots later, as we made our way back to my friend's loft apartment at 5 o'clock in the morning, Ninesh could see nothing clearly but remained adamant that he not only wanted to marry, but was sure he wanted it to be to a woman.
So we woke up on our wedding-day, blurry-eyed, muddle-headed but determined.
Outside the sky was painfully blue.
Ninesh pulled his sleeping bag over his head.
" Somebody turn off the sun," he moaned " what's for breakfast?"
" Lunch, you mean," said our friend climbing down the ladder from his loft bed, " it's 2 o'clock."
" Nesh," I shouted, struggling to sit up and hold my head at the same time, " we've missed our wedding.  We were meant to get married at 10 ."
From under the covers Ninesh groaned again.
" It's ok," said my friend, handing me a calming cup of coffee, " I phoned City Hall, they said if you are there before 3.30 you should still be ok to get married.  They don't close 'til 4. We can make it if we leave in the next 10 minutes."
Which is how come our wedding day found us hungover and gasping for breath, racing through Manhatten, me barefooted so that I could run faster,  diving on and off tubes and trains, arriving just in time to get married before the office closed for the day.

City Hall, New York

And all I can remember thinking as I sat on the train watching the Manhatten skyline speeding by, is how lucky I was not to be wearing a beautiful, priceless dress. 
Because the one thing you don't practice in any of the wedding shops, is running for the subway in your wedding dress.

Neither Ninesh nor I remember the date we got married but it doesn't really matter.
It was a long time ago and we are still together.
But the journey hasn't always been easy.
Like every couple, we have had our ups and downs.
There have been times when we have had to work hard at being together, work hard at being there for each other.
Understanding someone else is never easy, even when you love them.
Marriage is about compromise, about accepting each other for who you are and not trying to change each other into someone you are not. 
But in the end the effort has always, always been worth it.
Marriage is our prize that's worth fighting for.

Of course my friend found her perfect dress.
She stepped through the curtains and took my breath away.
She looked stunningly beautiful.
" It's like a red-carpet dress," she smiled.
And she was right.
And I know, on her wedding day everyone will cry because she will look so beautiful and her future husband will feel like the luckiest man in the world.
But a wedding lasts just one day ( or sometimes just a few minutes! ).
A marriage is for the rest of your life.
So here's hoping that the rest of their life together is one long red carpet of dreams and love and happiness, even if they are only wearing ripped jeans and old T-shirts as they walk along it.

Never Again

I think I'm glad that I never have to be 17 again.
Never again  have to go through the agony and the ecstasy, the soul- searching and the confusion and most of all never again have to deal with hormones raging in uncontrollable  waves through my body.
At 17 the world oscillates from hope to despair, from laughter to tears, from unlimited possibilities to utter boredom at a break-neck speed.
It's exhausting to watch, let alone experience.
And worst of all, is the searching for love.
Fun as it is flirting your way towards Mr ( or Mrs ) Right, the emotional and mental games we play with each other are painful and often unnecessarily mean.
Everyone is too scared to say how they really feel and too frightened to risk the pain of rejection and heartbreak.
So instead we pretend that no one really matters.
Why do we do it to each other?  
Why, when we are young, is it so hard to tell someone you care, to say " I like you, let's try each other out and see what happens next."
Is it so hard to admit that you want someone standing next to you while you take your first steps into adulthood?
So hard to say " come walk and talk with me a while?"
So hard to share each other's dreams?
Meeting up, just the two of you, is rare in this social- media, risk averse age.
 Instead of spending time together, relationships are lived out through texts and Snapchats with the occasional coupling at drunken parties.
" How horrible," says my friend when I talk to her about it.  " How sad not to date anymore, not to look into a boy's eyes and feel your stomach flipping over."
And she's right, how sad and how horrible.
" You don't understand," says our 17 year old daughter "  that's not how it works.."
" Then how does it work?" I wonder.
How will you ever get to know each other, if you never talk?
How will you ever begin to fall in love if you never sit opposite each other and sense the warmth of a smile or feel the shiver of a touch? 
How will you ever share the tears and laughter that make life worth living?
And how will you ever learn what it means to really be there for someone else?
I'm not sure that writing LOL or Hahaha in a text or ending a message with a sad faced emoji, are quite the same thing.

" In my day," I tell our daughter, " we didn't have mobile phones.  If a boy asked for your number, you had to spend days hanging around at home just in case he phoned.  And you couldn't even move far from the room with the phone in because the phone was attached to the wall."
She looks at me, horrified.
" But what if the phone rang  and somebody else answered it?"
" Well," I explain, "  they would say hello and maybe chat for a bit and then come and get me and tell me someone was on the phone for me.."
" How embarrassing," she says.
Was it embarrassing?
 I try to remember.
Was it so terrible that my parents and brother and sister recognised the voices of some of my friends and every now and again managed a short conversation with them?
Was it so terrible that teenagers sometimes had to talk adults?
Was it so terrible that our lives weren't separated by the shimmeringly impassable wall of  a cyber-bubble?.
The strange thing about social networking is that it makes everything in your life more public and everything that you actually feel more private.
But maybe that's the point.
What's scary is the personal, 
Being impersonal and flippant is what keeps your heart safe.
What's important in a text is not what is actually being said but how good your comebacks are.
What's important when you snapchat is not the words but how best to capture the moment with an image showing your best side.
There's no quiet place to sit and talk in the social media universe.
No end to the constant stream of trivial information that can fill a quiet moment.
No time to sit and wonder how you really feel-the next text could arrive at any moment.
Was it so awful to have hours each day when you couldn't communicate with each other and instead daydreamed about the things you would say the next time you spoke.
It's strange, but the year that my husband, Ninesh, and I, spent apart, he in America and me in England, is probably the year that we talked the most.
All we had were our phone calls.
We talked about everything and nothing, about how we felt about each other and what we had for breakfast, about politics and partying, about work and love.
" Talking to each other is really important," I say to our kids.
Our two teenagers sigh and for just a moment raise their eyes from their screens to give me a sympathetic look. 
" We are talking mum," they say, " what do you think texting is. We're talking to everyone all the time."
" But what about talking to just one person some of the time?" I ask. " And how do you know what someone is really thinking if you can't see or hear them?"
" You have to stop asking so many questions mum." they say, fingers flying across their phone keys. " We're just teenagers and this is what we do.  Stop making everything such a big deal."
And unwillingly I have to admit, they have a point.. 
I need to stop living my life vicariously.
I need to stop feeling that they are missing out on something. 
Because I think perhaps the truth is, that it is me who is missing out.
That perhaps  what makes me sad is that as a curious parent wanting to be over-involved in my children's social-life, their texting, snap-chatting universe excludes me.
" I'm writing a blog about being 17" I say, walking into the living room where our daughter and her friends are huddled together on the sofa under a duvet, passing around phones to make sure no message or image is missed.
" Cool," they say, " can you take a photo of us so we can be in it? It's about us, right?"
And that's when I remember the good part about being 17.
The part where the world revolves around you, where " right now," is all that matters and where you can eat as much chocolate and ice cream as you want. 
" Good idea," I say "Remind me how to take a photo with my phone."

Ollie, Charlie and Mia

And they are compassionately patient as they explain yet again what buttons I need to press.
And I don't think it's that I can't learn, I think it is that with every bone in my body I resist it.
Perhaps they are right, our teenagers, that just like my parents before me,  I don't understand how modern relationships work.
And sometimes it's cold out here in the land of yesteryear where phones were attached to walls and the only way to communicate was by talking.
But I can't help remembering that heart-melting feeling when you stared into the eyes of someone you cared about and, reaching out to each other, walked hand-in-hand into the perfectly setting sun.