Wedding Bell Blues

Royal Wedding tea bags

The first few years after my divorce I could not attend a wedding without crying and feeling cynical at the same time. There I was, in my early fifties, after the dissolution of a 26-year marriage and 32-year friendship, watching a young couple pledging "'Till death do us part." Hah! I would think. Wait until reality sets in.

People with worse marriages than mine were still married. At the time he left, my husband was looking for something new and different. His sister had just married her third husband, and his brother his third wife. I was married for life, but he was looking for ways to extend the excitement in our marriage. He wanted to re-experience the fresh, tender feelings that his siblings and their new spouses were exhibiting. At first he lost weight, bought a motorcycle, purchased a van for his bikes and drove it cross country, took a sabbatical in New Zealand, etc. But nothing would stop the progress of his aging, including his graying wife.And so he started to look at me with jaundiced eyes, until nothing I did was right.

With that experience in mind, I would watch a marriage ceremony with a cynicism that, had the young couple known of my doubts, they would never have invited me.

Time has a strange way of healing. The process is slow and uneven. Although this vestige of bitterness stayed with me for a long time, I knew I had changed when I became caught up in the Wills and Kate Royal Wedding hoopla. I won't be watching the ceremony live, for I will be working. But my cynicism has largely gone. I hope this young couple will find a lifetime of wedded bliss in their gilded fish bowl. Heaven only knows how, but QE2 and Prince Phillip managed to do so.