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I have a friend who is getting married. His bride to be is beside herself with excitement. It is all she thinks about, talks about. As a one time bride myself, I can remember the excitement that, leading up to the big day, consumed my whole self. When I say leading up to I mean the week before, possibly the month before, but the whole year before? I know when you have been waiting for this day since you were a small girl it must be overwhelming to be finally reaching your goal, but the energy involved in sustaining this excitement for all that time must leave a girl a frazzled wreck long before the big day actually arrives. I can't blame her, as a society we encourage our little girls to practice with wedding dress up Barbie, to nurture and cherish this dream, offer them role models that promote sacrifice for marriage and standing by your man, until finally it can be made into a big fat expensive reality.

I love my friends who are getting married , but there is a scary thought that niggles away in the back of my mind. What happens when it is over, the few remaining vol-au-vents have gone stale, the balloons are deflating and the dress has been sent off to the dry cleaners, ready to be packed into a box and stuffed in the loft as a luxurious addition to the insulation, when the memory of the day fades and life is full of dusting and cleaning out the fridge, with no honeymoon to make the dull routine of a mediocre career more bearable? Will the newly married woman spend her time dreaming of her day as a princess or will discontent set in quickly as she realises that life is not a romantic comedy? Do these dreams of a perfect wedding leading to a perfect marriage, with of course, the house and the two children to match raise our expectations too high and add to the boom in divorce?

I was also once a little girl, my dreams filled not with confetti and wedding cake, but of show jumping and winning the Grand National. If I had really had to, I would have settled for being a mounted policewoman ( I was a bit keen on horses). I was counted as a tom boy, I didn't dress up as a princess, or dream of the day I wow my friends and family as a beautiful bride. My dreams were centered around me and the exciting life I could have, not waiting for the day I could enter into domestic bliss. As my own wedding day becomes a distant memory and our children are a more frequent bed partner than my husband, I am happy to make the transition from newly wed to mother, sometimes I get fed up with the never-ending round of coughs and colds and dirty nappies, but I know that this is only one stage of my life, the wedding was just the beginning of it, not the end. There is more to me than a wife and mother, I am me, and I am happy to enjoy this stage of building a family and raising my two sons, I had no expectations of what this would be like, so everything is new and exciting, I am not constantly striving to reach a dream, which might not become a reality.

If the dream is the wedding, is everything that follows a disappointment? Is the only solution wedding after wedding, hoping to finally find the wedding that will keep you happy for the rest of your life? Call me cynical but give me the Grand National any day!

Learn more about this author, Rachel Bray.
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