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Met my now wife in high school. We've been together since high school.
We've been married for 5 years now.
I'm 40 next.
So kinda agree with the post, but not the sentiment that if you met your partner early you're weird. I was lucky I met the love of my life so young. Just because you didn't doesn't mean I'm weird, just not as lucky as me.
My wife and I both met at the tail end of college in our early 20s, we knew pretty quickly what we had but we didn't rush things other than moving in with each other after the first year. We didn't get married for another 10 years.
I almost feel like weddings early on can put huge stress on a marriage. Even if you have somebody paying for it all it creates a lot of crap to deal with and you can get forced to meet and deal with a huge amount of new family members all at once instead of slowly integrating into those things over time. We had to pay for our wedding ourselves so had zero rush and invited only who we really wanted to be there, and while it was a blast it was still stressful. But holy shit that limo ride back to the hotel room when it was all over is a top 5 moment in both our lives.
Yeah we got married on our 18th anniversary of being a couple. I always said I didn't believe in marriage and I still think it's a silly idea to be honest.
My argument was that we had made the choice to be together and to be an exclusive couple. There was zero need to get married to have that. It's a certificate that costs a fortune just to have someone else tell us the terms and conditions of our relationship. I had proposed to her a few years into being together and we just remained engaged for a decade or more.
My Wife had an issue before the marriage where she would get odd looks off some people, some of the time, when our surnames came up. My kids had my surname and she had hers, and there's still a stigma to that from some people.
So she changed her name legally to my surname at some point, so we even had that benefit without technically being married.
Then one day she just said "Hey should we get married? Doesn't have to cost much at this point." I had zero argument against it except the tired old arguements of "It's just a bit of paper, we don't need the State to tell us we're together." So we went ahead, and I picked the date of our anniversary so I didn't have to remember another date.
It was a Monday so that immediately cut the people that didn't wanna book a day off work, and it cost us £500 including food and venue (the pub over the road from our house which didn't open during the day on a Monday). And it was a cracking day. We could just wander home if we needed anything, and when we'd had enough drinking we just toddled over the road.
As for the wedding night, my Wife still ribs me for the fact I just rolled into bed drunk and snored.
What we managed to do was prove that a wedding doesn't need to be too much of a stress, or cost the earth, to be a meaningful event. It's still a high-point in our lives, but we didn't really gain anything from doing it.
One thing I will never understand is the people that think that it's an important part of a relationship. A guy at work was talking about the length of his marriage. He is much older than me and was saying he had been married 40 years. I piped up that we had been together for 23 years and married for 5 and he just replied "Yeah but we've been married for 40 years" like the 18 years before our "ceremony" were meaningless. But this is the same guy that asked me yesterday if I was "A Fucking Puff or something" because I've painted my nails black. There's a generation of people still alive that think like this and honestly, I hope it's gone by the time my kids grow up.