Days to Go...

When we sign on to "The KNOT"-- a popular wedding site we are using to house our wedding info website and where we can get information, look at images of cakes, or any other "wedding" planning dilemma we might face, there is a little pop-up dashboard that shares the following: Kori & Theresa--Wedding Date: August 13, 2011--Days to Go: 191; every day we get to watch the count down. But I cannot help but wonder, the count down to what?

The wedding industry is, of course, an industry. I know full well that when I am fussing about online or pick up a print magazine, there are myriad businesses who want to sell me all sorts of items that no wedding would be without. In fact, I am quite convinced that part of the engine that is driving the move toward marriage equality is fueled by all the businesses who realize that gay people just may save the wedding industry. So, the count down, of course, is toward the wedding day. Unfortunately (or fortunately) for Teri and I, we are thinking in terms of years and decades and NOT just the days or months leading up to our ceremony and celebration.

Teri and I have almost a century of combined living between us--we are aware that we are not going to celebrate a 50th wedding anniversary and both of us have been on the ending side of relationships. Those realities are not stopping us from thinking of our commitment as a life-long one. Somewhere along the line, "40 years" has become our measuring unit--as in, "We need to find rings that we can both wear for the next forty years" or "Are you still going to be wearing that tattered lavender robe forty years from now?"

It would be so much more inspiring to me if when I signed on to our wedding planning site in the morning, it said you have 14,605 days left to go; how much more motivated I would be to spend every one of those days with the woman I love, living as authentically as possible. Our wedding is important to us, but the commitment for life means a heckuva lot more...