A little lightbulb moment.

[emsk]

I finally worked out one of the reasons that sitting with the vicar before our wedding had such an emotional impact on me.

Growing up in Mum’s faith, there were certain expectations of things that would happen before marrying in the church. One of those would be the couple sitting with a couple of the older folks in the congregation for… couples counselling, I guess would be the term, talking over why you wanted to marry, whether it was the right thing to do, if you were really prepared to commit your lives to one another.

Some part of my hindbrain must have been expecting it, somewhere along the lines. In between Tobermory’s health problems, the whole stress of travelling overseas, being terrified of Seventy Complete Strangers, the whole thing, I don’t know that I ever sat down and just had the chance to tell someone WHY I wanted to marry him. Why I trusted that he wanted to marry me. Why, despite our very human frailties and issues, I felt that we had a life together that I wanted to keep, trusted to work, and had faith in a future of.

Our friends… well, they knew us, foibles and all, and you don’t really question why your friends are getting married, I suppose. Family, likewise.

The vicar was a lovely man. He got us talking, entirely aside from the religious aspect, just talking about ourselves. Partly as a reaction to his desire to only be performing a marriage for a couple he actually felt reasonably confident about, I guess – he struck me as a man with a genuine desire to live his faith. And the ability to share how I felt about life in that setting, how I felt about the marriage we were about to begin on that Saturday…

I don’t remember all of that evening, at this distance. The jetlag didn’t help. But I do remember the vicar saying to us that there was a certain poetry between us. The way we’d feed conversation lines to each other, joke and tease back and forth.

I think he was a bit of a romantic, too.

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