Everything I Know About Love — Wedding Reading, by Dolly Alderton (amended by Samuel Goodwin)

Here comes the first of what I have decided a three-part series, based on my wedding. I would like to use this proud platform to share a couple of highlights of our day, through the thought of words and where love really stood out on its own.

Stepping back in time ever slightly - it was the start of April of last year, one of my longest friends tied the knot with the love of her life in a gorgeous Tauranga based ceremony, surrounded by long term friendships and family. It was simply lovely. Of whom would be one of Emma’s oldest friends Haley, spoke a magnificent reading, which capsulated the hearts of my wife to be Laura and I.

After a few questions asked, a bit of research, and some slight amendments, some nine months later, the same but slightly altered reading was presented at our own ceremony, read by my wife’s sister-in-law. I still read it from time to time, just to remember what love is, and how it is captured amongst the beauty of life.

So alas, Everything I Know About Love — Wedding Reading, by Dolly Alderton (amended by Samuel Goodwin)

“I know that love can be loud and joyful… It can be dancing in the swampy mud and the pouring rain at a festival and shouting “YOU ARE AMAZING” over the band. 

It’s introducing them to your colleagues at a work event and basking in pride as they make people laugh and make you look lovable just by energy of being loved by them.

It’s having your own language no one else understands.

It’s flying to a part of the world neither of you have been in before.

It’s the wine in Queenstown, and the gins till sundown. 

It’s walking seaside in Barcelona together on a Saturday night and feeling the entire city is yours.

It’s a big, beautiful, ebullient force of nature.

I also know that love is a pretty quiet.

It’s the easy mornings driving together drinking coffee, talking about where you’re going to go drink more coffee. 

It’s calling each other sunny, even on the greyest of days.

It’s feeling safe together within the four walls, and the holding hands on evening neighbourhood walks.

It’s hanging up their laundry when they leave the house having foolishly forgotten to take it out of the washing machine.

It’s saying ‘You’re safer here than in a car’ as they question plane capabilities on an EasyJet flight to Copenhagen.

It’s the texts: ‘Made it to work safe love’, ‘How did you sleep?’, ‘Thinking of you today’ and ‘I'll cook tonight’.

I know that love happens under the splendour of moon and stars and fireworks and sunsets, but it also happens when you’re lying on blow-up airbeds in a childhood bedroom, sitting in A&E or in the queue for a passport, or in a traffic jam.

Love is a quiet, reassuring, relaxing, pottering, pedantic, harmonious hum of a thing; something you can easily forget is there, even though its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall.”

Thank you for reading, and of course, my email is always open for ideas, thoughts or general conversation.

SBG