After the Instagram Wedding, Then What?
The Wedding Is Sparkle. The Relationship Is Where You Live
Valentine’s week has me thinking about how love changes as we grow. My wedding had a band that wrapped up by ten.
Valentine’s week has me thinking about how love changes as we grow.
My wedding had a band that wrapped up by ten.
When we got hungry later, we wandered into town to a bar and ended up eating turkey sandwiches sometime around midnight. My big splurges were a fairytale dress and a flower-heavy cake that could have fed a small village.
It snowed that quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s. Soft piles outside the church windows. Everything sparkled. Including our expectations.
We were young and wildly optimistic. We believed love and commitment would carry us through anything.
And honestly, it carried us through a lot.
We raised two incredible children. We built a life together. And eventually, we realized that the life we were building was taking us in different directions. Years later, we are both happily partnered with other people and still genuinely friendly.
Sometimes that is the happy ending. Just not the one you picture at twenty-three.
What we did not do back then was ask many hard questions. About money. About ambition. About how we each handle stress. About what happens when one person grows in a direction the other did not expect. We assumed love would smooth the edges for us.
It turns out love is powerful. It just is not magic glue.
I still love the sparkle though.
I love a dress that makes you feel like the main character. I love a room full of people cheering for two humans brave enough to choose each other out loud. I love the flowers and the music and the kind of joy that makes everyone cry a little during the vows.
I will never be anti-wedding. I will never be anti-magic.
What I have learned is that the part that keeps me coming back to love has less to do with the party and more to do with what happens after the last photo is posted.
No one posts the first disagreement about how to load the dishwasher.
No one captions the moment you realize your partner’s quirks are not a phase. They are simply who they are.
No one makes a reel about the quiet conversations about money, or the “discussion” about whose family you are seeing for the holidays, or the apology after something small turns sharp.
Those moments do not photograph well. But they are where the relationship actually lives.
Communication has been the steepest learning curve of my adult life.
For a long time, I avoided hard conversations. I hoped love would smooth things out for me. I thought if we cared about each other enough, the rest would sort itself out.
It does not.
What has changed my relationships, across the board, is learning to say the thing sooner. To clear the air before it gets heavy. To ask a question instead of making an assumption. To lean toward the people who are willing to meet me in the conversation and gently step back from the ones who are not.
That shift changed my former marriage. It changed my relationship with my children. It changed my friendships. And it is one of the reasons I have the partnership I have now.
I live with my partner. We came into this relationship with fewer illusions and more honesty. We still have plenty to learn. But we are on the same page most of the time, and when we are not, we talk about it.
When you are aligned ninety-five percent of the time and willing to talk through the other five, something settles. That kind of communication feels less like a performance review and more like cleaning the air before it gets stale.
That feels romantic to me in a way I did not understand the first time around.
I watch my kids navigate love now, and I am genuinely impressed. They love a good aesthetic, sure. But they also talk about expectations and boundaries in a way my generation never did. They are more emotionally fluent. They name things sooner. They expect to share the load.
My parents’ generation believed in grit. You fixed what you could and got on with it.
My generation learned some things the long way. Divorce. Therapy. Blended families. Second chances. We figured it out midstream and carried the lessons forward.
Every generation works with the tools it has. The tools look different. The work does not. Choosing each other over and over again is still brave.
The wedding is a celebration. The relationship is where you live.
And when the relationship feels like a warm, safe place to land at the end of the day, the sparkle does not disappear. It becomes even more luminous. The butterflies do not go away. They just feel less frantic and more steady.
Valentine’s week is a beautiful excuse to celebrate the flowers, the photos, and the magic. It is also a good moment to check in. Not in a heavy way. Just a small pause to ask, “How are we doing?”
That is why I created the relationship quizzes. Not to diagnose anyone. Not to fix anything. Just to open conversations with a little humor and curiosity. The kind that keeps things light while still moving them forward.
Compatible, Combustible, or Just…Lackluster? was meant to make it easier to start talking.
And if you want more ways to keep the connection playful, my book Love Laughs is full of prompts and ideas to remind you why you chose each other in the first place
I still believe in the sparkle.
I just believe even more in the quiet, everyday moments that make you want to stay.
Happy Valentine’s week.