• Our Wedding: How I Feel About Being Married
  • Our Wedding: How I Feel About Being Married

    For the final post in this ‘Wedding Week‘ series, I wanted to sit down and put my thoughts to paper, or to screen, rather. So far in the series I’ve shared a great deal about our personal wedding ceremony, opened up about wedding dress shopping, revealed all about how we decorated our empty warehouse venue and the little personal touches we added to make our day feel like ours.

    I suppose they’re what you’re expected to write or talk about when you say you’re going to be sharing your wedding on the blog. They’re the parts you spend the majority of your time thinking about and obsessing over when wedding planning. But arguably the most important part of a wedding is actually what happens afterwards – the marriage.

    So much focus is put on the wedding day itself and the planning of the day by the wedding industry. All the articles centre around choosing flowers, laying out your table plan and DIYing decorations, but there aren’t many that talk about actually becoming husband and wife, not just on that day, but the rest of your lives.

    Now, we’re only two weeks and two days into this married life so we’re certainly no experts, but I wanted to share how I’m currently feeling about being a wife, about being married.


    Don’t miss all the posts about our Wedding Day:

    Photos by Captured By Katrina

    A modern, industrial wedding at Trinity Buoy Wharf warehouse in East London
    A modern, industrial wedding at Trinity Buoy Wharf warehouse in East London

    I’ve known for the longest time that I wanted to marry Michael. We first got together at 16. Well, I was 17 and he was 16 as he’s a month younger than me, my handsome toyboy haha. So I’ve had plenty of time to weigh up my options and be sure I wouldn’t regret my life choices the minute I said ‘I do’. There was never any doubt in my mind, he is the one for me. In fact, our friends and family all said ‘About time!’ when we announced our engagement. But I didn’t really stop and think about how I felt about becoming a wife whilst we were planning our wedding. I fussed over seating plans and stressed over finding a caterer, distracted myself with scrolling through #industrialwedding on Instagram for the 1000th time. I guess because I was so sure a future with Michael is what I wanted, there wasn’t a need to stop and think about it. But since getting married, one of the most popular questions we’ve both been asked is “How does it feel?”. The honest answer to that question? Not that different!

    The day after our wedding, we woke up still on a high. We packed up our hotel room and made our way to have a leisurely lunch together, as we’d slept through breakfast. We’d stayed at Good Hotel London so enjoyed our lunch looking out at the river, feeling so lucky that our day had been full of sunshine as the day after was grey and non-stop rain. I’d bought us hubby and wifey t-shirts to wear, which just shows Michael still had all the feels from our wedding day as he actually agreed to wear his! One of Michael’s groomsmen, Adam, picked up us and took us home where we unpacked our decorations from his car. We all had some of our wedding cake together, then shortly after Adam left, Michael and I both fell asleep – we were shattered! In the days that followed, I felt so happy yet so close to tears at the same time. As we opened our cards, sorted through our gifts and read through the messages left in our guestbook, I just kept wanting to cry tears of happiness. Our friends and family had been so kind, loving, supportive and generous. I felt so, so lucky and couldn’t believe our day had been everything we’d planned and hoped for. It took us a while to catch up on sleep and feel ourselves again. All that excitement and emotion is exhausting.

    Now we’re both back at work and life has pretty much returned to normal, and I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. We had a great life together before we were married so why should anything change now? Marriage hasn’t changed how we are with each other. I love that Michael and I are already a strong team and have been for many years. He’s my best friend, the love of my life and now he’s my husband. I love when I catch sight of Michael’s wedding ring. I look down at mine and I’m reminded that we’re tied together in this special way.

    Changing my name is a weird one though. I was adamant I wanted to take Michael’s name so that I’d have the same name as our children, but when I changed my name on Facebook it felt weird. It didn’t look like my name. For 28 years I’ve had one name, and now it’s changed. I had a Ghanaian surname and now I have a Nigerian name. I’m the only girl of four children, so it feels strange to know that I’ll be the only one with a different surname to my siblings. I filled in a form the other day and I wasn’t sure what name to put as I don’t actually know what my legal name is at the moment. My marriage certificate says one name, but my passport says another. I feel like I’m in this identity limbo whilst I go through the long and annoying process of changing my name everywhere. Sigh.

    One thing I wasn’t ready for were the expectations and questions from others, like “When’s the honeymoon” and “When will you have children?”. I take my hat off to anyone who plans their honeymoon at the same time as the wedding, I really do! We want to go to Bali and travel around, possibly visiting Singapore too. I didn’t have the time or headspace to research where to stay in Bali, how long to spend in each place and calculate a honeymoon budget at the same time as planning the wedding. So now #ProjectWedding is done, I can begin #ProjectBali! We’re thinking of going early Summer next year so I’m excited to get stuck into planning our honeymoon to Bali soon.

    Regarding the children question, I get why people ask, but I don’t like it. I don’t know how to answer that question. The truth is, the idea scares me a little. Not the idea of becoming a Mum, I’ve always wanted children. It’s the getting pregnant part that scares me. We’ve spent our whole relationship trying to avoid getting pregnant, we don’t know how easy or difficult it will be for us. I’ve seen enough people close to me have a miscarriage to know that having a baby is not as easy as throwing away the contraception. And with me having PCOS I know that my risk of having difficulty getting pregnant is possibly heightened, so I don’t like being asked that question because I don’t know the answer. For example, we could say we’d like to have our first child in two year’s time, but it might take us a year of trying, or it might take the first try. Who knows?!

    So what is next for us? Michael doesn’t have any races until mid-September when we’ll both be going to Edinburgh for his Spartan Ultra Beast. So before then we’ll be planning dates and making the most of our time together, even if it’s just cooking dinner and watching a film together. I’ve recently had this overwhelming urge to ‘nest’ and get our home looking how I’d like. I’d started moving towards a more minimal lifestyle earlier this year but paused as the wedding approached. Now I want to finish clearing out my belongings and redecorate a little bit. Oh, and planning our Bali honeymoon, of course!


    Don’t miss all of the posts about our Wedding Day:


    So this is it, the end of Wedding Week! I hope you’ve enjoyed this series as I’ve loved reliving our wedding day and sharing our photos with you. Thank you so much for all your lovely comments! Good luck to any brides-to-bes! I wish you the best day ever, just as ours was.


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    Photos by Captured By Katrina

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