1 week on.

So this is Love. This quiet peace. This complicit communion. This stillness. Why did I not realise this before?

I feel more in love than I've ever been...I say 'more', it's entirely different to anything I've ever been. Before I measured love in heartbeats per second, in obsession, behaviour analysis and time-spent willing the phone to ring. I've always been someone who thrives on drama and excitement, who is fearful of peacefulness in case it gives way to boredom.

And now this calm.

I feel a bit like I've just invented the wheel or discovered water displacement and yelled out 'Eureka'. And I'm going to share this with you, even though many of you are already married and will probably know this already (unless you're 'normal' people who do not think anywhere near as much as me, but you're reading my blog so I think this is unlikely) - you can look on with patronising indulgence like the father who's just pushed his child's bike for the 100th time and the child for once doesn't fall over but rather wobbles on in that mystery of balance and euphoria.

There is a difference between getting married and becoming married.

Getting married is the easy part - there are flowers for one thing and all you need to do is stay rooted to one place and repeat the words of the vicar / clerk and you're married. Easy.

Becoming married has, for me, been significantly harder.

Now this may of course have something to do with the fact that I decided to leave everything familiar and my entire support network in England a week before I got married. On reflection that was definitely an instance of biting off so much that my jaw had to dislocate itself in order to even stand a chance of successfully chewing (ouch).

The process of becoming married felt like shedding a skin - a comfortable skin that I was perfectly happy in - and underneath that old comfortable skin was a new, raw, needing-breaking-in skin. This metaphor is making me squeamish (and I've just realised that coupled with the jaw dislocation, there is something of an unintentional serpentine theme going on), but you get the picture?

When people talk about getting married they just talk about this lightness and golden-glow, the happiest-day-of-your-life. They fail to mention that part of the process is a necessary loss - a giving up, a surrender. I'm not saying these are bad things, they are inevitable and necessary but they are hard.

Accepting that my role as 'daughter', 'sister', 'friend' had been succeeded by 'wife' was hard. Taking on a new name and finding myself without a signature was hard. Realising that life decisions now need to be made as a pair rather than just on my own is hard (and will probably get harder when the first significant life decision arises). Promising forever when I have no idea what forever will bring is hard (especially for a person with control issues such as myself).

It all sounds so darn obvious now and I feel stupid to admit it (especially because Jeremy was about 20 steps ahead of me on all of this) but I had no idea quite how monumental all of this would feel, or how much of a struggle it would be to win the will to get married, to commit, to shrug off my old self and step into the new.

For me, the happiest moment of my life was not on my wedding day (which was happy, but happy in a high-on-adrenalin-can't-stop-smiling way) but 5 days later on a beach in Cape Cod. Just me and my husband and a quiet calm. An answered prayer. A breathing-in. A recognition of Love as I'd always hoped but never known.

Married.