i do.

...love royal weddings. always have, quite likely always will.

i got hooked as a little girl, when i watched royal weddings with my grandma, starting with that of fergie and andrew. my grandma loved reading about europes royals, especially the english ones, in cheapo yellow press mags with badly re-touched photos on their covers; proclaiming new drama, every week.
in recent years, i realised i also like royal funeral and christenings, anything royal, really, as long as its on the telly with bad experts talking about nothing for hours. hmmmm: royals! give me that charming young prince william, anytime!

so i spend this morning just the way i spend last friday afternoon, watching yet another royal wedding, and oh, was it lovely.

i ohhd and ahhd at everything and sniffled, a little (not as much as last week, when frederik cried... if you haven't seen anything, or heard his speech to his bride, read this and weep!) and not just because of this awful flu that is severly hampering my abilities to do pretty much anything.

this was a full on royal wedding: pretty bride & attractive groom; full on conservative but stylish deeply v-necked wedding dress; plenty of strangely dressed guests; a little drama (oh, the rain!); pretty hats and dresses and flowers; kisses; classic wedding music; a big fat catholic service (the catholic girl in me needs that kind of service in a wedding) and 1 corinthians 13:1-13. awwwww.

i like weddings, handfastings, love-proclamations, committment of any kind: i love them all. they don't have to be royal, but royal is always good, because of the grandeur and ultimate fairy-tale material on show.

in general, though, i think the main cause for my fascination with weddings is not just my XX chromosomes, it's seeing people, no matter of what gender or age, being so in love, so trusting in what they feel, that they want to tell the world about it in a public manner.
it rocks. seeing the massachussetts weddings last week got me teary eyed in front of the telly as well: my love of weddings doesn't solely stem from white dresses, big parties or catholic rituals or anything. - even though all that is surely nice. it's the love behind it.
britney spears 5 minute marriage left me stonecold. carmen electra and dave navarros nuptials didn't.

on my way to the supermarket this morning, i passed by two wedding parties in front of the mayors office, and they got me all happy, too. maybe it's just that happiness that i like, who knows.

when i was with evan, i was dead-set on marrying him.
i fantasized about where in melbourne we would get married, what it would be like. i looked at dresses on websites. i thought about who would dj, what the first song would be. - in short: i turned into the kind of woman i never wanted to be. i wanted a wedding like the other aussie-german couple we knew. my mistake was a common one: i thought much about *marrying* evan, not about *being married* to him. the first might have been fun: big parties are always good. the latter would have been a total desaster, probably sooner rather than later, for a multitute of reasons. i wanted marriage to make that surrealist, faulty relationship that we had to last.
i am happy that dream never came true.

these days, on a personal level, that wedding thing is a total non-issue for me.
i actually have a hard time understanding that i really wanted this all, a little more than a year ago, and seriously thought that sooner would be better than later.
.
that doesn't mean i never want to get married: i surely want to have a life partner, someone to live life with, to love, to have children with, the whole deal, with a big party and committment, too. however, it just doesn't seem urgent at all. - i'm not ready for any of that right now, and that's fine and dandy for me.
that doesn't mean that i don't see what dirk and i have as the real deal, as something that won't last. it's quite the opposite.
i enjoy our love so much in this present moment that excessively pondering the future just isn't an issue. - i don't know where the roads will take us this year, and why should i stress about it, when it's all good as it is? why should i push something on him neither of us wants or is ready for (yet)? a true partnership takes time to grow, and what has grown between us this past year is better than anything i ever experienced, ever. i am curious what will come, one moment at a time.

like the buddha said: "love in the past is only a memory. love in the future is only a fantasy. true love lives in the here and now."

yeah.