Liz Furl | On 11, Dec 2014
We had everything we wanted.
Only family and close friends had come to see us wed. The ceremony was officiated by a Justice of the Peace who took great pains to speak about us as if we hadn’t met the day before. My dress was perfectly altered, hair perfectly arranged, make-up airbrushed to the height of every girl’s dreams.
Seeing my husband-to-be looking handsome after a long day apart felt like something had blossomed in my chest. We walked into the chapel hand in hand, presenting ourselves as a unit about to be solidified. When he said his vows, I got tears in my eyes.
We had everything we wanted—but I would never say that it was the best day of my life.
We are still married, and I know that I got it right on the first try (he, on the other hand, needed a pre-me warm-up marriage, but that’s ultimately unimportant). I can see our elderly selves bickering over syntax, enjoying cocktail hour with 10 a.m. mimosas or 10 p.m. Manhattans, taking three hours to watch a one hour episode of television (our leisure activities require a lot of discussion), going to bed alone and waking up in the middle of the night to find him sound asleep on the couch (or a bar stool, or the floor) so that I may coax him to bed, and just sitting together in comfortable silences, muttering curses to our iPhone games, turning book pages with that familiar whisper of paper on paper, or staring down onto an iPad, taking in the day’s news.
It will be the loveliest life, fraught with annoyances, mistakes and anger, I’m sure, but in spite of and woven into all of that, there will be honest love.
But the day that signifies the beginning of our life together as ‘the Furls,’ ‘Furl&Furl, Attorneys at Law’ (we are not lawyers) or ‘the Rochester branch of the people called Furl’ (his parents are the Colorado office) was not the best day of my life.
It’s not because two of our guests passed out from dehydration in the middle of our wedding dinner, and we both ended up in the ER, keeping their spirits up amidst IVs and blood tests. It’s not because we never got to say a proper goodbye to my parents or his, and it’s not because I sliced my shin while shaving my legs, so there’s a Band-Aid present in most of our wedding photos. At the end of the day, we were married, and happy, and as we—well, as I—am somewhat of a disaster, the ridiculous mishaps of the day are nothing if not fitting.
In my mind, those casualties complement the beauty of the day without detracting from it; they’re not the reason my wedding day wasn’t the best day of my life.
I’m writing this in the very early morning of one of the last days of our honeymoon, looking out over a bed of primary rainforest next to the Pacific Ocean, the first time in my life I have seen it.
It’s beautiful, austere blue and serene in the way the Atlantic is a quicksilver of roiling grey. There are birds calling to each other across the canopy, and I’m beginning to learn their calls. When the sun was beginning to stretch and awaken, the insistent bays of the howler monkeys put the chirping of the bats to bed, and I left my handsome husband with a kiss for the comforts of coffee and a keyboard. He’ll join me later for a luxurious breakfast.
The sea breeze is meandering through the Osa Peninsula, the clouds are barely distinguishable from the sky, and I have a date with the beach and a book later on. It’s a charming day’s beginning, better even than the one on which I was married. With all the rushing around, I never had a chance to simply sit and relax—not once all day, in fact—and the Vegas vistas are nothing to this. Perhaps by the end of the day, I won’t be nearly so happy, but I’ll allow for the possibility at least.
I made vows about a month ago: to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, for as long as we both shall live.
If that day, touching and poignant as it was, is the best it gets, of what worth are the days that follow? What more do we have to look forward to, any of us?
For some, high school is the best time of their life. For others, it is college, your twenties, your wedding day, the birth of your children. These are all joyous milestones, but by focusing on them so intensely, by defining them as ‘the best of our lives,’ we deny the future its potential, its power, its possibility to bring us more happiness and import than we could imagine in this moment.
That’s why my wedding day cannot be the best day of my life. It’s impossible; I won’t allow it. I promised my husband to be his partner through our life together and all the dreams we have for it.
Maybe the next ‘best day of my life’ will come when I quit my job and can support myself through writing and podcasting alone. Maybe it will be the day we finally sell everything we own, buy a Winnebago and travel the continent—an undertaking comparably important and exciting as marriage, no doubt. Maybe we’ll move across the country or across the world. Maybe we’ll go completely nuts and decide to have a baby.
But whatever the best day of my life is, it’s always a day away.