In the weeks after getting married, newlywed bliss can come with a side of relief for some and post-wedding blues for others.
Or so I hear.
I managed to avoid all processing of post-wedding emotions by immediately uprooting my whole life afterward. Within three weeks of my wedding, I sold my house, quit my job, and moved to France from our home in the UK.
While I often imagined being engaged and planning my wedding when I was younger, I never expected to be juggling it with so many of life’s other biggest (and most stressful) events.
But my now-husband and I never fell out or argued throughout it all, which has to be a good sign.
I planned the wedding far in advance
We were engaged for just under 18 months and didn’t hire a wedding planner because I love design, organization, and hosting.
Unsurprisingly, I took the lead on wedding planning, but my husband certainly didn’t put his feet up, as he took charge of our move admin. We’ve moved for his job, after all.
After deciding where and when we wanted to have our wedding, we booked all our suppliers well in advance — we’d picked a June Saturday, one of the most popular wedding days, so there was no time to wait. I was so excited that I wanted to get on with it too.
There was a bit of a lull between choosing suppliers and making choices like our menu and music, but I tried to do as much as possible in advance, ticking off little things like buying toiletries for our restroom boxes.
Fortunately, I never really felt stressed about the wedding planning; it was more everything else going on around it, how much there was to do, and the fact that it was stealing my mental capacity away from wedding planning.
But on the flip side, I realized that not being able to focus solely on the wedding was a good thing, as it meant I couldn’t become completely consumed by it.
We couldn’t control the house sale timeline
Initially, I didn’t want to sell our house because I didn’t want the added layer of stress to take away from my enjoyment of wedding planning, but once we realized renting didn’t make financial sense (and we weren’t wedded to returning to the house or area), I reluctantly accepted that we should sell.
Trying to align the house sale with the move date while still fitting in our wedding was incredibly complicated. Of course, we had no idea how long it would take to get an offer once our house was on the market or how long the sale would take to go through.
When the house we’d lined up to move into in France fell through a month before the wedding, I couldn’t believe it. Fortunately, my husband happened to be in France at the time, so he was able to dash to the south coast as I frantically tried to set up house viewings while on a friend’s bachelorette weekend in the UK.
I had to accept that there were some things we simply couldn’t control, and although we ended up having to move out of our house sooner after the wedding than we’d have liked, it was manageable.
I had to prioritize
Moving to France meant leaving my full-time role at Business Insider, so it felt like the right time to launch my freelance career.
Ideally, I’d have liked to have lots of meetings with editors and contacts before moving, but I had to accept that there simply wasn’t time for much with everything else going on, and that was OK.
I was mentally at capacity, so I had to prioritize and accept that some things could wait until afterward — and the latest Netflix series isn’t going anywhere either. It’s amazing how much more you can get done in a week if you cut down from two episodes of a series each night to one.
While I took some time off work to get married, I kept my job as long as possible. On my final day, I started the drive to France immediately after closing my laptop.
For a while, we felt like we just needed to get through everything. Once we were married, had sold the house, and had successfully settled in France, we thought we could finally breathe.
It hasn’t exactly gone like that, as the culture shock has been greater than expected. But ultimately, all of these huge things we’ve squeezed into a short space of time have been good, exciting things, so I do feel really lucky.
It turns out that decompressing in the sunshine of southern France with a glass of rosé and some fresh bread is a great way to relax.
Read the full article here
