In the beginning

A few weeks ago, the girls from EAD asked their readers for comments about the blog, what they liked, what they’d like to see more of, and so on. As an avid reader since I started planning our own wedding a few months ago, I responded along the lines of ‘more real weddings – and more from the UK as quite a few of us readers are British’. Well, it seems that I, and you, are in luck. Guest poster Tiffany from Grant-Riley Weddings has already written about her London wedding and now I, Rachel, blogger and wedding-planner by night, something boring in the city of London by day, am going to write about my own English wedding which we are planning for 13 June 2009.

Where to start? Well, as for any good story you need to know the protagonists, the background and the themes before you start to flesh out the details…

I remember our first ‘date’ as if it were yesterday, only it was actually almost seven years ago. I use the word ‘date’ lightly – we don’t tend to use the word much in the UK – as we didn’t actually go out. My perception of the word ‘date’ comes from teen films and Sweet Valley High: boy picks up girl in his car, takes her somewhere, say to the cinema, they go out for some food, then somewhere to ‘make-out’ (or snog as we used to say as teenagers) and then boy takes girl back to her house before bedtime. Our first ‘date’ was nothing of the kind. I went to his house for supper and ended up leaving sometime the next afternoon (staying in a purely platonic fashion of course)! 

My now husband-to-be and I met in a student nightclub in our university town one Thursday evening in February 2002. I was there with some friends for someone’s birthday, although, truth be told, I didn’t know the girl in whose honour we were partying. M was at the nightclub with a group of his friends, who coincidentally turned out to be people I knew from my course. We weren’t so much introduced as took one look at each other and that was that. Not love as first sight as such, but looking back there was definitely something there, right from that very first moment.

And so started a friendship which gradually over the next few months turned into a relationship. A relationship that wasn’t without its ups and downs but somehow something stronger than us held it and us together, through university finals, through living 200 hundred miles apart whilst I went to Law School and M finished his undergraduate degree, through first jobs, another post graduate course for me, through stressful times, happy times and the everyday mundane of living and working. It continued through moving to London, living at first apart in shared houses with people we did know and then with people we didn’t, through moving in together into a little party flat in Primrose Hill and our subsequent move to a more grown up flat in Islington just over a year ago. And then, with four little words spoken on a beach in Cornwall, on 28 June 2008, when M asked me to be his wife, our lives became permanently entwined.