Married

So, what's it like, then? Getting married - the whole walking down the aisle and saying your vows thing - describe it for posterity in the blogosphere. Dish the dirt. Put it into pixels. Well, I would have to say it's the most overwhelming thing I've ever done. Nothing prepared me for it. The fact that my husband and I had been together for so long before we got round to actually marrying didn't remotely temper the emotional impact of it all. It was, quite simply, an amazing day.

We actually enjoyed ourselves, which was a fact that took us by surprise. There had been a low level hum of constant planning and organising throughout the eighteen months of our engagement, but this had turned into a full-on, roaring frenzy in the final six weeks before the big day. Returning from our Spanish jaunt marked the start of an unrelenting round of printing, phoning, shopping and general running around that didn't let up until the night before we were actually married. There was no time for quiet reflection and I think we both expected the wedding day itself to be a continuation of the sheer effort we were putting in, rather than the start of a new, long-anticipated chapter in our lives. The summit got lost in the climb, to an extent, but I suppose this made achieving the pinnacle of the ascent all the more pleasurable, coming as it did as a joyous shock and a startling achievement.

Even now we almost have to pinch ourselves to remind us that we are married. I still get referred to as "girlfriend" - a term I've never liked, to be honest. Gok Wan can probably get away with using it liberally, but even he would struggle to convince onlookers that I am realistically still in the full flush of girlhood. For my part, I rather enjoy introducing people to "my husband" but it takes a good deal of effort to remember to do it and, of course, I have slipped up now and then. At another wedding soon after ours, telling people that "my husband is a former colleague of the groom" felt alien, each conversation now etched in my memory as some kind of out-of-body experience. There was a certain satisfaction, though, in having a husband by my side and in not having to join in the scrum trying to catch the bouquet.

This feeling of being settled - of knowing that, however many petty arguments you might have about mud on the carpet or hair in the plughole, you've stood up and made this big public commitment that far overshadows daily nonsense - this is good. It feels like how life should be. This was reflected during the ceremony for me by the utter conviction that what I was doing was right. I dither by nature, but from the moment I got up on my wedding morning and started painting my toenails to the comforting sound of the Today programme, I was gripped by certainty. Today was my wedding day and that was the way things should be. I hoovered the flat early because it was my wedding day - I almost wanted to wake people up so that I could tell them. Walking through town to go and get my hair done I wanted to stop people and let them know I was marrying a wonderful man that day. I didn't, but in my head a dizzy bridal voice was screaming out to all the old familiar places I passed, "hey train station, Waga Mama, BBC Studios, Wine Shop - today I'm a bride!"

As a bride you get burled along in the tidal wave of it all, from getting ready to your walk down the aisle, champagne, photographs, food and dancing, but that's fine. You're at the centre of things, but you're not in control. You surrender willingly. Sometimes, if you're lucky, time seems to slow down and you can look at things from outside of yourself, almost, getting brief glimpses of what you can only describe (somewhat cheesily) as the love in the room. Some of the happiest memories I have are of looking around and seeing other people enjoying themselves, chatting over dinner or sharing a joke. People who I didn't think were dancers took to the floor, shuffling along to the jazz band in the evening as if they'd been waiting all their lives for the opportunity to strut their stuff. I liked that as much as I liked the feeling of flight as the skirt of my dress twirled around when I danced myself.

The intensity of something private made public during the ceremony made the day such a happy one, too. Looking into the eyes of my other half and promising to love him for the rest of my life made me feel as if we were the only two people in the room. I know every millimetre of those eyes now, each subtle change of iris hue, each lash, fleck and lid freckle. Then, of course, comes the moment when you get to see the professional photographs and you realise that, as you were making your promises, there was a room full of people there too. But more than that - those people were looking on, as focussed on your words as you were and smiling, feeling the same happiness you felt. This profound act was shared and people were happy for us. To me it's still hard to believe, but I think it's a truly amazing thing that so many people came so far to be there and be a part of it. I think it's great and I'll never be able to thank them enough for it. So many people showed up, gave their time, made so much effort and spent so much energy willingly to help make our day special and I feel that I owe them many lifetime's worth of gratitude.

The path to matrimony was one that I never thought we'd take, my new husband and I. Looking back on our wedding day, though, it seems like it was the completely natural thing to do. Having lived over a decade of our lives together, it feels fitting to celebrate our achievement. Though the promises we made to each other bring with them no guarantees of eternal wedded bliss, they provide us with a starting point for something new, a future to look forward to with hopefully many more years of happiness grounded in the formal commitment we've made. This thing - this "us" that somehow evolved out of a chance meeting at university and has kind of mapped out a life of its own in the twisted landscape of the passing years since, this strange enduring entity publicly manifested now as "love" - we, me and him, us - provided the best damn excuse for a party I've ever known.