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My husband and I were married on a cold, overcast afternoon the day before New Year’s Eve.
Neither of us had imagined having a winter wedding, but we needed to marry by January in order to be posted together for our next assignment. We both work as diplomats, our lives divided into chunks of time separated by tours abroad.
The timing of the wedding was not a drastic change of plans; we had decided to marry within months of our first meeting. We were like two lumbering comets destined for one another all those years but stuck in the stillness of space – parties, other relationships, the passing of loved ones, bad jobs, all the experiences in between – before the romantic collision that was our first hello in 2010.
“Today I met the boy I’m going to marry,” I confided (and almost sang) to a friend over the phone. “And if it doesn’t work out, don’t ever bring this up again.”
We knelt at Immaculate Conception church, in my home town in New Hampshire, in a white-knuckled grip before the altar only a year and a half after I first agreed to have lunch with him. In front of us, we watched as Aaron’s grandfather read from the Old Testament: Genesis 1:26-28, a reading I had picked out, being the more religious one.
He approached the pulpit dressed in a blue-checked suit, blue shirt and striped tie, an orchid pinned to his lapel. “Be fertile and multiply; fill the Earth and subdue it.”
My husband had consented to a traditional ceremony, which meant hours of marriage counselling in Bahrain, where he was posted. I took the 30-minute flight from my post in Qatar, and we spent the entire weekend in a room full of Filipinos in an officially Muslim country, becoming certified to marry in a Catholic church. Continue reading
- Christen Decker Kadkhodai is a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Department of State
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