Before, during, AND after we wed, translated…
My son who’d moved in, to the dorms after he’d started university would come home to visit every now and then, and would nag me about how messy the house got.
It isn’t that the house is messy or filled with dust or anything like that, it’s just that we’d kept a lot of the things (like those empty bottles of soda or juice, or those no-longer-in-use cardboard boxes), and, there would be, hairs fallen, or pieces of paper left on the floors—and, being a dual-income family, there’s no time to clean and sweep the floors from day to day, and naturally, the dusts, accumulated; plus, those plastic bags his mother brought home from the marketplaces are tied up in bundles, stuffed into the corners of the living room, it’d just, made the house look cramped and overcrowded.
the most grueling part is almost over…not my photo…
Every time my son started ranting on how messy the house is, I’d had NO comments, but thought to myself, “You hadn’t SEEN what messy is yet!”
I held firm to the belief, that “if a man decides to take care of a woman for the rest of her life, then, he must change his perceptions of what ‘messy’ is. The rituals from before the wedding is enough, to stress us all out, the engagement, the making the offers for the dowries, these are the basics, and, there’s the large and the small dowries, and, other than that, the wedding photos, selecting the cars to pick the bride and the groom to the wedding, electing the groom’s men and the bridesmaids, as well as setting for the wedding too, there’s too many things to get through.
just a little bit longer…
not my photo…
And finally, as we reached the day of the wedding, the grooms still must pass through the series of obstacles, set up by the brides’ family members too, and, unless you can manage, the bride will finally, get on that ride to the church with you. At the banquet, there’s, FIVE changes of our suits, and five changes of the brides’ dresses too, and, we’d needed to, head over to every single table, to offer our toasts, and, we’d often gotten, forced to drink too much too………
And now, the weddings are noisier, and those ordinary well-wishes no longer do the job, there would be need for games and what not, to entertain everybody, plus, the expressions of loving words from the bride and the groom to one another. And, after we’d passed through these hours, we’d still needed to, stand at the door of the restaurant, to see our guests off, and, the photos came one right after the next, flash, flash, flash. You think it’s over? There’s still barging in to the newlywed’s rooms, and, it can last, all the way past midnight, into the early morning hours, by the time everything is settled down, we are all already, too beat.
and finally, not my photo still…
It’s just a normal wedding ceremony, we’d not jumped out of an airplane, or got the services performed underwater in a scuba diving wedding, how come, it’s still, so very, hard to handle?
But I need to say, that after this period of chaos passes, a man is about to discover, that what comes next, he will be able to handle very well. Even if we got grilled by our superiors from work, seeing that smile on our wives’ faces, will lift us back up; and even IF we’d failed to make our quota by the month, we can head home to a prepared meal by our wives, and, we’d gotten our needed boosts again. The trials of the wedding seem to be preparing us for the days to come in the future, and when you realize, that your wife can always find what she needed in that huge PILE of mess, what other problem is there?
So, the wedding, based off of this man’s experiences, is the HARDEST, and, it is, because it’s a woman’s MOST important moment in life, and, the ladies all wanted it to be so special, so memorable, that they’d gone OUT of their ways, to make it that way, that, is why, the wedding is the hardest, and if you can get through the weddings, guys, then, you can basically, get through every and anything ELSE in life, because the hardest part is over, and now, you can finally, start enjoying, being married, if you’re lucky enough, that is…
Life, the Obstacle Course 