Wedding!

Last Friday there was a wedding, and it was good. Not too solemn, not too hectic. The Beautiful One's family and mine mixed fairly well, especially for a first meeting. The weather cooperated by remaining breezy, if not cool, and the ceremony was short and full of emotion. While it would have been nice to have been uncancerous, seeing as how I faded rapidly about 3/4 of the way through our celebratory meal, this day was about as perfect as I could have hoped for. I had written a piece for the ceremony, and The Beautiful One thought it might make for part of a nice blog entry, so in its entirety, here 'tis:

I wanted to start this with some sort of quote to match the occasion for which we are all gathered today, but I couldn't figure out a good one to use:

1) "This is the best of times, this is the worst of times." While accurate, this one is also incredibly cliched.
2) "These are the times that try men's souls." No, that'’s a bit of a downer, isn't it?
3) "The times they are a'changin'." Well, even if that'’s universally accurate, it's pretty vague.
4) "Time's article on Ann Coulter was a disgrace to journalism and an abomination to mankind." Perfect!

Well, ok, maybe a nifty lead isn't all that important. What is important, though, is that The Beautiful One and I are here to consecrate our union and to dedicate ourselves to each other. We welcome those of you who are here to bear witness to our mutual love and help us remember that through love we are all enriched. How that love is expressed, or in what ways society gives its own imprimatur to it, is, or should be at least, immaterial. I believe that love is such a personal emotion that anyone outside the bond can only understand but a little of it anyway. So we come together today, in a relatively informal manner and in some unusual circumstances, but with the knowledge that the underlying emotions are as true as if we had rented a huge hall with all the cupcakes we could afford.
The paths The Beautiful One and I traveled to get here have hardly been what anyone could have predicted. For my own part, I have walked down so many false relationship trails that everyone who knows me can be forgiven if they thought I would never figure love out or find someone willing to overlook my occasionally self-destructive past. For each misstep, however, I learned not only what to avoid, which is usually fairly easy to comprehend--—for most people, at any rate--—but also what to cherish in a partner and mate. And when The Beautiful One and I were just starting to get to know each other, over many long and sometimes sleep-inducing phone calls (just teasing, honey!), I was constantly and consistently amazed by how precisely this beauteous woman and I agreed on what we were looking for out of life and love. I knew that The Beautiful One was the right one for me from those phone calls. Convincing The Beautiful One that I was the right one for her, on the other hand, took some doing! Heck, simply trying to find novel ways of saying, "Hey, that'’s what I think, too!" or, "That'’s what I want, too!" was challenging enough.
This all sounds a bit clinical and calculated, I suppose, but the reality of it is that without the heat generated between us emotionally and physically, none of this wonderful parallelism would have mattered too much--—The Beautiful One and I would have become good friends and nothing more. The truth is that The Beautiful One fills my soul with nourishment and my eye with delight. She makes me laugh even as I hunger for her kiss. The contentment I feel knowing that we are together makes up for the times when I knew we belonged together but we weren't, in addition to that whole useless period of my life before I knew her at all. For whatever amount of time I have left in this world I will enjoy it, simply because The Beautiful One is beside me today. I will love her as nobody else can, forever.