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Huffington Post contributor Megan Isennock chronicled her own wedding in The Baltimore Sun's Married in Maryland blog where she's currently a freelance writer.
Almost every married person I spoke with before our wedding told me the same thing: "You guys have been together a while, but it will feel so different once you're married." But so far being married feels almost exactly the same as dating. I've been trying to figure out if this is unique to me, and I'm increasingly finding that among people my age, it's not. I can only assume it's because couples living together before their engagement is more and more commonplace.
My husband and I met as roommates. We both transferred into the University of Maryland and ended up in the same house. After a year we started dating and six years later we were married. Living together since even before we started dating allowed us to grow up through our twenties together, which isn't the easiest time to share bills and chores and a bed and everything with someone.
We are an entire month and a half into our marriage, so this post could serve little more than to expose my inexperience as a wife. But at the moment, it feels like we decided to throw a party last month where we promised to keep loving each other, and then got right back to our lives. I'll admit that the new title is throwing me off a bit. I definitely get the excited giggles when I say "husband" or hear Rob say "wife," but other than that everything is relatively the same.
And I'm grateful for the sameness. Change can be fun, but I really liked our relationship and feared that too much change would knock us off-kilter. I worried that taking the wedding planning too seriously would unearth some weird, temporary behavior in us. After the dust settled from the big day we would say, Who the heck was that guy yelling about the color of his bow tie? We worked to keep our relationship steady in the midst of our hectic summer, and I think our work paid off. Our return from Bride and Groom to Megan and Rob was a welcome one.
Though we may be missing out on the massive "different" feeling, I think my generation is lucky. Because it's no longer such a taboo to cohabitate before marriage, the person you marry is already familiar. You already know each other's weird habits, and your shared lives already have their own shared rhythms. Very few brides these days are lying awake on the eve of their wedding wondering which side of the bed their husband sleeps on, or if he's a morning person. A wedding in this day and age isn't a blind decision that launches a lifetime with someone you hope you can live happily with. It's a conscious decision to make a deeper commitment to a life you already know you love.
—Megan Isennock, Huffington Post Weddings
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