Our Wedding Story: The Introduction
(This post was written on the 13th of September 2018)
I’m sitting down to start writing this series three days before our one year engagement anniversary. That completely blows my mind! I cannot believe only one year has passed since the day my husband proposed, on a very, very unexpected evening in the South of France last September. Yes, it was exactly as romantic as it sounds!
But more than the warm fuzzy feeling the memory brings, my mind simply cannot wrap itself around the fact that that was only one year ago. It feels like simply ages have passed since we officially got engaged. The last year has been such a rollercoaster (almost entirely in the good, exciting way) that I cannot believe all the milestones and memories throughout that time, could have happened in only the last 12 months.
So, as fate would have it, it seems a perfect day to start this wedding series, looking back on the journey we, and I as a bride, took to get from engaged to married, from a girl who had never expected to have a big proper wedding, to a very happy Mr and Mrs with our own first home, far, far away from friends and family, living together for the very first time.
My now husband and I actually knew we were getting married well before we got engaged. Being long distance for three years meant we’d had a lot of discussions about the future, and nothing was totally a surprise. But I wasn’t expecting a proposal on a family holiday in September, and it accelerated our wedding planning process by a mile!
We had begun to discuss a summer 2018 wedding but nothing had been finalized, and making it official surprised me with the speed with which it went form ‘shall we get married sometime in 2018/2019’ to ‘let’s send out save the dates for the 16th of June’. The countdown had well and truly begun.
It’s crazy for me to reflect on the fact that during the summer of 2017 I still didn’t know for sure when we would be getting married, whether we’d be living in the same country even after we married (everyone was adamant that I don’t move to Iraq), or in fact, where in the world we would be getting married!
Everything was a great big mystery, and sitting here, on the other side, in Iraq, with photos of our beautiful London wedding dotted around the house, it kind of feels surreal, as though I’m remembering someone else’s life but my own
Over the next few weeks or months I want to put together a really comprehensive series of posts and advice here on my blog for other brides to be, because the sheer volume of information that comes at you the moment you set the date is actually enormously overwhelming.
I spent hours reading and researching and I feel like I really got to grips with the ins and outs of the whole process, and I hope that in some small way I can help you with yours. It really is the most exciting time in your life, but it really, really doesn’t have to be the most stressful. Let’s begin shall we!
Check back soon!
