Wedding Attire and Getting Real About Marriage
I love a good occasion to get dressed up. More so now that I am a mom. It’s not often my husband and I get to dress up and get a sitter for the night so I appreciate it that much more when we do. It is so fun to put on a dress and take time on my makeup and hair. When I found this particular dress from bebe I instantly fell in love. The lace detail was just gorgeous. I was amazed at their selection and found that most of the dresses were fairly reasonable with pricing.
Wedding season is always my favorite time of year and my husband and I feel so blessed to have a few couples that we get to celebrate this summer. As a counselor by profession I am extremely passionate about marriage and what it takes to have a lasting and healthy one. I have worked with a lot of couples and I am always amazed at how impactful having a great community around you can be for having a great marriage. One reason weddings are so fun for me is because you not only get to celebrate a couple but you get to see the community of people who are in their lives and love them deeply.
There is something so beautiful about watching two people make a commitment to stick by each other’s side and love through the hard moments as well as the joyful ones. While not all the marriages I have seen with friends and family have made it the distance I feel blessed to have a community of people around me who have strong marriages. I don’t mean perfect. I think some of the strongest ones have actually been the ones where they have gone through seasons that are really tough and pushed through. We have had more than one friend couple sitting across from us on our couch talking through challenges in their marriage but to me, being willing to fight to uphold their commitment is the most beautiful picture of what it is to really love someone.
My husband and I have been there too. Let me tell you friends, being a therapist does not make someone a perfect wife! I can counsel couples and teach them skills and then at times find myself not using them in the moments that really matter. Having a baby was a hard transition for us but having friends who could support us, pray with us and encourage us in those moments made all the difference. I am completely convinced that none of us are meant to do life alone. I know my marriage would be in a very different place if we didn’t let other wise and caring friends into it. I sometimes need to hear from someone outside my relationship that I am being a bit selfish or was wrong in some way. I sometimes need someone outside of me to help me sort through what my responsibility is in responding to a disagreement or owning my side of how I am contributing to an issue.
The best kind of friends are not the ones that bash your husband with you while you vent and throw back glasses of wine to help you forget. They are the ones that help you to love deeper and harder and stronger than you thought was possible. They are the ones who say “this is worth the fight and when your tired I am here for you to lean on”. This is why I love weddings because it is a couples very first act of letting others into their relationship. I think we often forget that the reason we are at a wedding is not ONLY to celebrate but to witness. We witness the vows they make to each other so down the road, if things get hard, we can be there to remind them what they promised and support them in upholding their commitment. I think if more couples had people who would really walk with them through the hard seasons we would see so many more marriages last.
So, this season as you get dressed up and head out to celebrate your friends getting married, I would encourage you to think about the ways you can support them for the long haul. Be the friend that picks up the phone months or years down the road and asks how they are really doing and genuinely cares. Be someone who is safe to share with and who can both validate the struggles and say the difficult things in love to point them back to loving each other in the hard ways. If your in a hard season yourself I would encourage you to find someone safe and let them in. Marriage is a marathon and not a sprint. We start training for it the day we are born by learning from our own families (good and bad). We all come to it prepared in different ways but we all have one thing in common. We are not meant to do it alone.
Dress: BEBE (shop gowns here) | Sunglasses: Rayban | Heels: Aldo (similar here)
