A Reflection on Marriage, Performance, and Perspective
I’m less than four months away from my wedding and the invitations have already been sent out. The RSVP list is slowly forming its own shape, vendors are confirmed, deposits paid, group chats created, and on paper everything looks exactly the way it is supposed to at this stage of planning.
And people keep asking if I’m excited.
I usually pause for a moment before answering, partly because the emotion I’m experiencing doesn’t quite match the tone of the question. There is an expectation that I should be glowing, counting down the days, overwhelmed in a celebratory way. Instead, what I feel is something much quieter. I feel steady, grounded, almost practical about the whole thing.
Most of my days still look like my normal life. I wake up, I work, I train, I build my business, I cook, and I think about the future in very unglamorous spreadsheets. The wedding exists somewhere inside all of that, but it has not swallowed the rest of my life whole.
And maybe part of that is age.
I’m old enough now to have attended many grand weddings. Ballroom ceilings dripping with florals., five outfit changes, cinematic highlight reels.. and speeches that promised forever with absolute certainty.
I’m also old enough to have watched some of those same marriages quietly dissolve a few years later.
No one posts the paperwork. No one schedules a second photoshoot for the separation. There are no anniversary montages documenting the difficult parts. The spectacle is beautifully preserved while the maintenance of the relationship happens privately, often invisibly.
Witnessing that enough times shifts the way you see things.
It makes you realise that a wedding is very good at performing permanence. Marriage itself is much quieter and far less theatrical. It is built in ordinary kitchens and on random Wednesday nights, in the way two people handle money stress, illness, ego, exhaustion, and disappointment. It is built in who washes the dishes when the other person is burnt out.
So when I feel myself drifting toward the gravitational pull of the wedding-industrial complex and all the invisible expectations that come with it, I take a step back.
You should upgrade the package.
You should add more florals.
You should make it bigger.
You should maximise this once-in-a-lifetime moment.
You should feel more.
And I often find myself wondering who exactly decided that?!
There is an entire ecosystem built around convincing couples that if the day is not extraordinary enough then something must be missing, that love needs to be displayed to be validated and that intimacy somehow becomes more legitimate when it has an audience.
My relationship with celebrations has always been a little complicated. I grew up in a household where big occasions were fragile and where gatherings could shift into conflict without much warning. I learned very early that spectacle does not equal safety and that a loud room does not necessarily mean a secure one. You can gather two hundred people in a ballroom and still feel entirely alone.
Belonging, for me, has never been about how many people are watching. It has always been about whether I can simply exist as myself.
For most of my childhood, home was not a place where I could fully relax into that feeling. There was always tension humming quietly beneath the surface and I learned to read atmospheres carefully. Stability felt like something you earned by being agreeable enough, useful enough, quiet enough.
So now, standing on the edge of marriage, what moves me the most is not the production of the wedding day. What moves me is the simple realisation that my nervous system does not feel like it’s bracing.
There is no dramatic uncertainty in this relationship. There is no frantic attachment and no pressure to perform a particular version of myself in order to secure love. There is partnership. There are disagreements that do not threaten abandonment. There are conversations about CPF, mortgages, and long-term planning that somehow feel more romantic to me than any pre-wedding photoshoot concept.
Perhaps the reason I am not overwhelmed with excitement is that I am not overwhelmed with fear.
In my twenties, love often felt intense in a way that I mistook for depth. If a relationship did not feel destabilising, I sometimes assumed something was missing. Adrenaline became easy to confuse with connection, and longing could disguise itself as devotion. It took time to recognise how much of that emotional template was shaped by growing up in environments where love felt unpredictable.
This time, the experience feels different. It feels slower, steadier, and more intentional. It feels like something that is chosen and then chosen again the next day.
And maybe that is why I am careful not to let wedding planning consume everything around it. I do not want to begin measuring the relationship by how impressive the event looks, and I do not want to find myself pulled into a checklist that was never designed around our actual values. I do not want to wake up one day feeling more concerned about centrepieces than about how we are actually relating to each other.
I have seen what happens when the performance becomes more important than the foundation.
So when people ask if I’m excited, the most honest answer I can give is that I am not intoxicated by the event. I am quietly committed to the life.
The wedding is a marker, a gathering, a moment of celebration with the people who matter. It is not proof of success and it is not insurance against future hardship. It is not a shield against divorce statistics or a guarantee of permanence.
It is simply a day. The marriage will be built in the thousands of ordinary days that follow.
Perhaps what looks like a lack of excitement is actually perspective, it is what happens after you have lived long enough to realise that longevity is not created by aesthetics.
Nothing is wrong with me. If anything, I am resisting the pressure to be swept up by something that was never meant to define the depth of what we are building.
I do not need the day to be grand in order to feel secure.
I just need the life to be real.