From toilet brushes to tracksuits and diary management, we reveal the truth about life after the 'I do's'...
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9. Start it!From toilet brushes to tracksuits and diary management, we reveal the truth about life after the 'I do's'...
BROWSE THROUGH THOUSANDS OF WEDDING DRESSES HERE
PLANNING YOUR DREAM WEDDING? START HERE...
WHAT DOES YOUR DRESS SAY ABOUT YOU? -
Being a wife means accepting that, despite the fact that you both speak English and have no hearing difficulties, you enter a kind of conversational vortex. No matter how often you tell him your parents are coming at the weekend or that he needs to march the kids to swimming lessons that week, he will always turn round at some point - usually two minutes before the event is due to take place - and say: 'You never told me that!'Even though I have perfect recall of the moment I told him - where we were, what he was wearing, the fact he had egg on his chin from his breakfast - he will still not believe the conversation ever took place. It is as if we have entered the Bermuda Triangle: the words leave your mouth but mysteriously never make it to the ears of your husband. But being a wife means going on a long journey of ups and downs but knowing as long as you're together, you'll get there in the end. And accepting that you are the only person in the household who knows what a toilet brush is for. YVONNE ILLSLEY
BROWSE THROUGH THOUSANDS OF WEDDING DRESSES HERE
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WHAT DOES YOUR DRESS SAY ABOUT YOU? -
I’ve been married for 17 years, but I still don’t like the title of ‘wife’. I blame my mother: she always told my sisters and me to earn our own money and be financially independent from our partners throughout life – mostly because she wasn’t. But it was probably the best advice ever and something I encourage in my girls too. No, I prefer ‘partner’. We finish each other’s thoughts and sentences. We often give each other identical presents. We share a home. Office, children and pets, yet we can still surprise each other. He’s my dearest friend, a true soul mate, thoughtful and loving. So for me being a wife means being one half of a team. He’s the first person to whom I tell my highs and my lows and I can’t imagine life without him. JO GLANVILLE-BLACKBURN
BROWSE THROUGH THOUSANDS OF WEDDING DRESSES HERE
PLANNING YOUR DREAM WEDDING? START HERE...
WHAT DOES YOUR DRESS SAY ABOUT YOU? -
Being a wife has meant being seen as the head of the household in the eyes of my husband’s friends. As soon as we married, they stopped calling him and instead started contacting me to arrange nights out of visits, to see if he could arrange nights out or visits, to see if he could attend their birthdays or, even a couple of times, just to see how he was. I am the one with the diary, granted, but I didn’t expect to become his voice bow and social director. It also means I have had to become accustomed to entertaining men far more regularly. With the majority of his friends still unmarried, I sometimes feel like Nancy, feeding and carousing with a gang of Fagin’s boys. No longer a sexual object, not quite a mother figure, I’m privy to their swearing, their sex stories, their disappointments and their hangovers, all the while trying to keep the cream carpet clean and their bellies full. GRACE TIMOTHY
BROWSE THROUGH THOUSANDS OF WEDDING DRESSES HERE
PLANNING YOUR DREAM WEDDING? START HERE...
WHAT DOES YOUR DRESS SAY ABOUT YOU? -
The word wife is so loaded: it means so many things to so many people. To some it means a prison and others a paradise. For me it’s all about family. I remember a friend telling me that even though she loved her husband and felt secure, it was not until she said ‘I do’ that the nagging voice inside her head relaxed and a wave of calm washed over her. I think all women, deep down, relate to this. Since day one my husband has always been my family but it was after I became a wife that I had a shift. I thought: ‘Right, I have you on lockdown. You had the leasehold to my fine booty for years and now that’s turned into marital freehold so you are really, really going to be the father of my children. We now have twin baby girls! ATEH JEWEL
BROWSE THROUGH THOUSANDS OF WEDDING DRESSES HERE
PLANNING YOUR DREAM WEDDING? START HERE...
WHAT DOES YOUR DRESS SAY ABOUT YOU? -
In the past, I was rather afraid of being a wife. The word sounded old and non-feminist, conjuring up someone unsexy and fanatical about housework. Could you be a wife, I wondered, and still be an independent woman, not expected to put your husband’s needs before your own? But not I am a wife, I’ve realised we both put each other’s needs before our own and always have. And the knowledge that we’ll both be doing that for each other until we’re old, wrinkly and yes, totally unsexy, is precisely what makes being married so lovely. FRANCESCA STEELE
BROWSE THROUGH THOUSANDS OF WEDDING DRESSES HERE
PLANNING YOUR DREAM WEDDING? START HERE...
WHAT DOES YOUR DRESS SAY ABOUT YOU? -
Being a new wife means constantly hearing: 'When are you having a baby?' It's as if you walk up the aisle a young, carefree lass in love and walk down a womb on legs. It's also about having ambitions for two. It was no longer just my career, professional success and progress that caused me to plot, plan and occasionally celebrate. Now I had another parallel line of work running alongside my own. I've never been worried about my husband 'bringing home the bacon' or having a good opening gambit at dinner parties. His happiness is instrinsic to my own, and a big part of that for him - an equally ambitious person - is work. So when we went for a promotion I woke up in a sweat, made midnight notes, planned outfits and started imagining what the new job would be like. On the day he would find out who got the job, I paced and couldn't eat a bit. And when he called to say he got it, the tears rivalled those I she when I got my first job. GRACE TIMOTHY
BROWSE THROUGH THOUSANDS OF WEDDING DRESSES HERE
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WHAT DOES YOUR DRESS SAY ABOUT YOU? -
1. Being a wife is about being honest - like when he gives you his scripts to read (he's a writer) and there are jokes that don't work. 2 .Deciding that it's OK to give up my career for a significant amount of time to be a stay-at-home mum when the time comes. 3. Never wearing a tracksuit. No one wants to come home to Vicky Pollard. 4. Sitting through old episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard/The A-Team/CHiPS with him because that makes him happy - despite the fact that I'd quite happily live without a TV. 5. Never trying to change your husband. I've never understood why you would marry someone and then try to change them. I find it easier to just change my perspective than try to change someone else. 6. Making sure the house is clean and you can cook up a storm (yes, I'm an old-fashioned girl like that). FUNMI FETTO
BROWSE THROUGH THOUSANDS OF WEDDING DRESSES HERE
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WHAT DOES YOUR DRESS SAY ABOUT YOU? -
I never could say the f-word: fiancée. That temporary title sounded a little too smug, a bit bridezilla and almost tantamount to yelling: 'I'm getting married! I'm not going to be a crazy spinster! Look at my ring!' I told everyone that getting married wouldn't change us. We were relatively young (26) and I was paranoid a wedding ring would be the seal of death on our invites to the cool, non-married-people parties. But we have changed. Not seismically; our relationship is just more sure of itself. There's no fear that the tiniest argument would escalate into a split. There are no more 'if' conversations: 'If we get married.' 'If we have kids.' It was an 'if we get married' comment in a field in Glastonbury that prompted Pete to propose. He corrected me: 'Not if, Fi, when we get married.' We now live in that world of when. FIONA KERR
BROWSE THROUGH THOUSANDS OF WEDDING DRESSES HERE
PLANNING YOUR DREAM WEDDING? START HERE...
WHAT DOES YOUR DRESS SAY ABOUT YOU? -
Being a wife means joining another family, in a surprisingly feudal way. You're suddenly a link on a family tree and once you start having kids together, there's a real sense that you're mashing up genes. That whatever your future together, you're irretrievably in each other's lives forever. It's also about understanding that marriage shifts over time, like two tectonic plates rubbing up against each other. Marriage is not stable or still - it's always moving. Sometimes you love them more than they love you and vice versa. Sometimes you're happy and he's not. And sometimes one of you needs more TLC than the other. Change is the lifeblood of a good marriage, not its death knell. POLLY WILLIAMS
BROWSE THROUGH THOUSANDS OF WEDDING DRESSES HERE
PLANNING YOUR DREAM WEDDING? START HERE...
WHAT DOES YOUR DRESS SAY ABOUT YOU? -
I have friends who think it's sort of unsexy to be the wife. But I think it's twice as sexy, much more romantic and 100 per cent more desirable than being the girlfriend. You can't not do it because that would be like going to the seaside and not getting into the ocean. I would say this - being the second wife - but I think there's something particularly life-affirming and joyful about marrying lateish in life, when one of you has been there once and really should know better. Marrying when you're young and full of hope is lovely, but marrying when you have every reason to believe people are disappointing, and marriage is a dying institution, is breathtakingly exciting. You feel like you're a couple of superheroes with X-ray vision and fatter hears than everyone around you. That wears off a bit of course - but it's still a blast. SHANE WATSON
BROWSE THROUGH THOUSANDS OF WEDDING DRESSES HERE
PLANNING YOUR DREAM WEDDING? START HERE...
WHAT DOES YOUR DRESS SAY ABOUT YOU? -
Being a wife has meant taking hold of my inner control freak! As a determined, single-minded girl, I always felt in control of my own destiny (and weekend plans and wallpaper choices). Yet falling in love with an equally dynamic man has meant that our now entwined futures have to be figured out together. White he may say I still have a knack for railroading things, I've learnt that marriage means I have to share the responsibility for our plans. I've actually begun to love the excitement of having someone else throwing in ideas and making things happen for us. It turns out that two heads - and hearts - are better than one. SARAH TOMCZAK
BROWSE THROUGH THOUSANDS OF WEDDING DRESSES HERE
PLANNING YOUR DREAM WEDDING? START HERE...
WHAT DOES YOUR DRESS SAY ABOUT YOU?
