Our theme for the month of June is “confessions.”

I have a confession to make. I regret my wedding, a little bit.

To be clear: I don’t regret my marriage. Choosing to spend my life together with Heidi is one of the easiest and best decisions I’ve ever made. For the same reason, I also don’t regret getting married young. The timing made sense to me, I had no doubts about the commitment, and I was much more certain about the relationship than I was about much else in my life at the time.

Truthfully, I have complicated feelings about marriage as an institution, and I did then, too. But I can certainly appreciate a good ritual, and the idea of gathering your community to witness and celebrate your companionship is something I can get behind.

What’s more, everyone involved in our wedding did an amazing job. The service, the reception, the music, the food, the photos, the flowers—everything went off without a hitch, looked beautiful, and happened exactly as we had planned. I am still endlessly grateful for the time, effort, and money that went into making it happen. I’d like to think we even managed to sidestep some of the worst pitfalls of your average wedding. But it was nevertheless a very traditional wedding in a lot of ways, and…I don’t think that really reflects us, either as individuals or as a pair.

When you plan a wedding, you have to decide all sorts of things that you may or may not have thought about before. Neither Heidi nor I had ever vividly imagined a hypothetical wedding years in advance the way some do, which meant every detail was a brand new decision with a surprising amount of culturally-imposed weight. “You only get one chance,” “those memories will last forever,” “it will be the best day of your life!” That’s the kind of thing that was running through my head. Plus, this planning was happening during our final semester of college, which made it pretty hard to focus. Even despite this, we were able to make plenty of those decisions with some confidence, like the chapel, the vows, the officiant. And, again, those things turned out great! But looking back, I wouldn’t call it the best day of my life.

Sure, the planning was stressful. I think that’s normal, honestly. But by the time we actually had the wedding, we were living in this shitty apartment that probably had mold in the walls, which meant our stress was high and our overall well-being was relatively low. The pandemic waves were still hitting pretty hard, so we severely limited our guest list and totally cancelled the idea of travelling somewhere for a honeymoon. Instead, we returned to our awful, cramped apartment and immediately launched into the workforce as adults, trying to function outside of a school routine for the first time in our lives. So in retrospect, maybe the timing wasn’t so great after all.

Nowadays, though, our lives are in a much different, much more stable spot, and we are older and more sure of ourselves. If I could do it today instead, I would be much more methodically involved in the planning, and I would build it from the ground up. A few things would stay the same, but the structure would change a lot. I would invite different people, including new friends I’ve made in the last few years. Both Heidi and I would look and wear something completely different. Choices about the food and the timing of events would be made much more carefully. Maybe Birdie would even play a role, somehow.

Even still; imagine all this had been true, and the wedding took place this year. Maybe we still technically got married in 2021, but delayed the whole wedding ordeal just as we delayed our honeymoon. Would I look back in another five years and come to the same conclusion? That there’s so much I would do differently, and that we should have waited? It’s definitely possible, but I can’t say for sure. In both cases, five years of foresight is a lot to ask.

So I can’t really begrudge my twenty-one-year-old self for not waiting—or twenty-one-year-old Heidi, either. We were certain we wanted to get married, and we thought that meant we were certain we wanted to have a wedding right then. I can’t blame us for not knowing to separate those two things.

Philip Rienstra

Phil Rienstra (they/he) (’21) studied writing and music, and since graduating has developed an interest in labor rights and coffee. They’re an amateur chef, a perennial bandana wearer, a fledgling dungeon master, and an Enneagram 4. He lives in St. Paul with his spouse, Heidi.