In which it feels weird to recap a big non-event in a blog I’ve kept “running” but left stagnating

My last post was written in the beginning of the year that we are on our way out of, and curiously, about how much (and how long!) I’ve been sharing about my life online. It’s not that I ever stopped, but the medium reflects the attention span, I suppose. I’ve gotten the sought after 20-slide carousel on Instagram and have also been somewhat active on TikTok, but have left my first love — and first receptacle of oversharing — in the dust.

I never meant to; it’s just that I’ve gotten used to less processing times for my thoughts and feelings, and it’s easier to post in-app rather than downloading pictures (because what good is a slice of life blog without pictures) and resizing and uploading, etc., etc. I ran my blogs like a magazine, and now that I have to work a full-time job as well as keep up with my art practice, as best I can, it kind of feels a bit like more extraneous effort, sharing my life on this thing. Who even reads blogs anymore?

Still, it does not fulfil the same need. Like, 100-photo Facebook albums of a night out, I can do without. Cheesy, navel-gazing into the void that I pay an annual fee to keep for posterity: I can never leave it.

So, yes. I got married. On 2 August 2024. To Mark, who I met in 2020, a few months after lockdown restrictions lifted. I don’t think I’ve written about him at length — just posted cute pics on Instagram even though he’s wanted to have a smaller digital footprint — and that’s a shame because he’s really been my favourite person outside my family.

I couldn’t really tell you what compelled us (or me, really) to have the wedding when we had it. I think I just wanted to be married and didn’t want the faff of all the planning and logisitcs that came with a wedding as we know it. Really, I could only think of that poem, by Stephen Dunn, The Kiss:

She pressed her lips to mind.
—a typo

How many years I must have yearned
for someone’s lips against mind.
Pheromones, newly born, were floating
between us. There was hardly any air.

She kissed me again, reaching that place
that sends messages to toes and fingertips,
then all the way to something like home.
Some music was playing on its own.

Nothing like a woman who knows
to kiss the right thing at the right time,
then kisses the things she’s missed.
How had I ever settled for less?

I was thinking this is intelligence,
this is the wisest tongue
since the Oracle got into a Greek’s ear,
speaking sense. It’s the Good,

defining itself. I was out of my mind.
She was in. We married as soon as we could.

“The Kiss” from Everything Else in the World by Stephen Dunn, poets.org

I was just in love and I was happy and I wanted to be married.

We had the second to the most basic ceremony at St. George’s Town Hall in Tower Hamlets, which is the borough in which we both live. We had two official witnesses, Honor and Ian, and had 8 guests total between the two of us. Nimi took a video of the whole ceremony (about 7 minutes) and at various points, the officiant dropped a pen, Mark repeated the wrong words, and I couldn’t help but feel so many emotions well up inside of me.

I’m not usually impulsive, though I can be, and it was at the moment where I was repeating “some of the most important words in [my] life” (allegedly) that I really grasped the magnitude of what I was doing. Luckily, I did want to take this step. I just didn’t quite realise until then the enormity of it all.

We walked to Lahore, a Pakistani restaurant about 10 minutes away from the court house, and loads of drivers and pedestrians we passed wished us a congratulations. It was a lovely, warm day, which I never thought I would have wanted as a wedding day. (I’ve always been an autumn girl.)

Ten minutes away, we booked a table at a pub in Aldgate, and a bunch of people came by to celebrate with us. I’ve not kept a lot of friends in the city close. Everyone’s always busy, and it’s such a transient city that the handful of connections I do manage to make get challenged by distance. A lot of the people that showed up were friends I made at work — good friends — and some friends Mark knew from film school. I had a few uni friends there; even my uni bestie, Daniella, who had moved away to Seville but was fortuitously visiting London that week with her boyfriend.

Although I would have loved both our families to be there, it was perfect for what it was. I didn’t want them to travel so long a distance for a ceremony this simple, and to be honest, I wanted to share something more intimate with both our families for the first time they meet one another.

I know that’s probably contentious, and I’m a bit surprised by the reactions I’ve gotten about “not inviting” my family to my wedding, but I think Mark and I really view the wedding and celebration itself so casually, it didn’t make sense to have them travel from Ireland, the Philippines, and in the case of his youngest sister, all the way from Perth. Anyway, I don’t feel much like explaining. It felt like the right decision for us.

SO YES. I AM MARRIED. I have been for almost two months, and I’ve only sat down to write about it now. That’s crazy. I used to write about every little detail about my life, without a care as to who would be reading. I’ve made precious friendships that way, and learned about how the rest of the world turned, on the computer my family shared in the living room, and then later, in the little bedroom that I shared with my sister.

What’s wild is that I also turned 36 about a month ago. 36! It feels like a big number, but I still feel quite small. Not in a diminutive, self-effacing way. Just that everything else is still so big. 36 is big, but everything else is so much bigger, still. I was going to go in about something Rancière and Derrida wrote, but maybe not today. Maybe I’ll just finish this story here and keep it about my wedding and my husband (!) and how happy I have been before, and since, and how happy I still am.

More photos below, just because.