The Coffee Table

The Quest for Wedding Wisdom

I’m preparing songs to sing at my daughter’s wedding. As I go through my music books, I find I can skip most songs because they are about heartbreak. Or worse. But every so often, I find a gem. A song whose author was obviously writing from some transcendental mindset.

I’ve tried out a few songs that seem perfect for the nuptials, but I can’t get through them without bursting into tears—because I know that even if my late husband didn’t write these songs (he did write some of them), he sometimes sang them to me. Or if we heard one on the radio, he’d tell me what an absolutely fabulous song it was, and I was to intuit the why. Now, while I am practicing to perform these love songs at our daughter’s wedding, the why overwhelms me, disrupting the flow of my breath. Sometimes to the point of extinguishing my singing all together. The fingerpicking continues, but the throat closes up.

I think we sometimes look at love all wrong. All of us. It’s not about finding the perfect mate. The guy who thinks just like you. The gal who holds all the same ideals. Couples rarely fit together like puzzle pieces. Rather, a mysterious power grabs your guts when you aren’t looking, and refuses to let go. 

Because that binding is so tight, you can find yourself agitated when things aren’t going smoothly. When the one you’re bound to isn’t acting appropriately. The way that suits you at the moment. And you want that person to wake up and fix things. Tweak a behavior. Retrain a habit. And that’s where we get into trouble.

If and when we can love a mate for who they are, and not who we thought they were, wish they were, or expect them to become, we are achieving nirvana. This requires that you live your own life how you see fit, in accordance with your own standards, and let the other person do likewise—even when their standards don’t entirely jive with yours. It sounds so simple.  But it’s the hardest thing on the planet to actually achieve.

There were times when I couldn’t understand why my husband did something, said something, or felt something—as if I should be the arbiter of even what he gets to feel! And maybe I was miffed. Or hurt. Maybe, for a moment (or an hour, or a day) I thought we weren’t such a good match after all.  

But if I had stopped at those moments, and tried to sing the love songs I am working on today, I would have remembered at that instant that the man loved me more than anything in the universe, regardless of the  irritants we allowed to get under our skin. And that the love was reciprocal.

I recently survived the first anniversary of my darling’s death and wish I could tell him what I now see. Wish we could sing our favorite love songs together again. Oh, people—don’t sweat the small stuff. Or even the big stuff!  When you get mad at the mate who is the center of your life, stop! Take a big breath. Then sing your sweetheart’s favorite love song. Out loud. Mean it. And let the roiling judgment go.

That is what I want to convey at the wedding of my Molly and her beau, Chris, who will be getting married as this column goes to press. I hope I can find just the right song. And I hope I can get through it.