How being a teacher helped me have the best stress-free wedding day ever

The fruits of my student teaching labors are so sweet – some “fruits” include realizing I’ve become more trusting of myself and my abilities as an educator and not taking so many things personally. These realizations of my growth haven’t always been so clear – some pop up in unexpected moments when I stop and say, “Wow, I learned that from student teaching, too!”

I had not expected so much growth from student teaching, however, to reveal itself on my wedding day, making it so stress-free and fun. Here’s what I’ve decided:

1. Teaching taught me how to be flexible. As a teacher, you work weeks, months, and even years to create the perfect curriculum with its accompanying lesson plans. You attend professional development meetings, make decisions for this audience you’ve never really had all together before but know you care about already, do tons of research, and collaborate with people who are more experienced in this field than you. Not much is different when planning a wedding. You meet with vendors, try to balance your own style with the preferences of your guests, do tons of research, and (hopefully) collaborate with people who are more experienced in wedding planning than you.

AND AFTER ALL THAT PLANNING, it hardly ever goes according to plan. So you need to be flexible.. flexible with people showing up later than when you told them to, people wanting to eat from the sweet table before they’ve even touched the 300+ piece appetizer table, etc. You are not dealing with 30 students here – you are dealing with so many people from all over the place.. things are bound to morph into something you hadn’t even considered.. and it’ll be okay if you’re okay with the organic flow that results from hundreds of fallible human beings being in one place. Teaching taught me that sometimes, the unplanned is way better than the planned – but you need to trust in the process and be flexible with it.

2. Teaching taught me that I need to trust my colleagues. I’m not incredibly experienced as an educator, but I do know that the teaching profession will be miserable for me if I don’t place trust into who I’m working with, whether I agree with them (their styles and methods) or not. Wedding planning gives you an advantage here – you get to choose who you work with! You choose your photographer, DJ, caterer, venue, etc. If you’ve done your research and met with them extensively, you have a solid idea of who you’ll be working with to plan this incredible day. From the moment I signed the contracts, I trusted that these people I hired will do a perfect job of executing my vision of my wedding day. It was a great feeling when my DJ came up to me and said, “The Polish folk dancers want to dance at 7:30 instead of 9, like you told them. I’ll take care of this.” And I trusted him completely. It was an amazing release of responsibility, control, and stress, knowing that I could rely on this support system that I had hired for myself. If you trust your colleagues in teaching, you will enjoy your job ten times more. If you trust your vendors at your wedding, you will enjoy yourself one hundred times more.

3. Teaching taught me that I need to forgive. When teachers make a mistake, it can be anywhere on the “Oops, I messed up” spectrum. It can be as little as accidentally eating someone else’s lunch (How can this happen? If you’re really stressed out??) or as big as enforcing a policy on one of your students that you never stated (Again, totally making this up. Who would do this?). The same mistakes happen at a wedding, along the same spectrum.. Low: “Oh, they’re eating the desserts. Before dinner” or High: “The cake never showed?!” Human beings are not perfect and they are not your slaves, even if it is your wedding day and you paid for it so underallcircumstances everything should be done according to your wishes because you’re the bride and didn’t you already mention that you paid for this!?

If you’re a teacher, you are naturally forgiving. You forgive students every second – when they’re sleeping during the lesson you worked on all night, when one student says a comment that cuts straight into your insecurities and you fight to keep your outer shell intact, and when they don’t say “thank you” after every time you go out of your way to make their lives a little better. Forgiving is in our blood. So when things go wrong at your wedding – when someone says something out of line, when someone keeps going to the sweet table after the DJ has already announced five times that the sweet table is not indeed open, when your groom realizes he forgot the snacks (that he individually packaged earlier that day) in the trunk of a car far, far away.. you need to forgive. Immediately. Every second. Any bit of bitterness, resentment, or ill-will that you harbor towards anyone on your wedding day will make it more sour than it ever should be.

Because I forgave mistakes immediately, my day was perfect. Because I placed my trust in my support system, my day was perfect. Because I was flexible and recognized that the day was going to be exactly how it was meant to be, my day was perfect. Yes, there were a few moments when I had a slight panic and could feel myself enter that awful heavy feeling of stress, but my awareness of the fleetingness of these moments, the opportunity to share the love I have towards my now-husband with my family and friends, and the pure joy I felt at being blessed to have these people in my life all helped me center myself and appreciate it all. You know, just like teaching.

Tags: Stress-free, Teaching, Wedding

Keeping Desire Alive in a Long-term Relationship

I am enrolled in a course this spring entitled “The Nature and Culture of Love.” This class explores how “love” has changed through human experience. The feelings have stayed the same–why it hurts, why it takes so long to get over somebody–but the circumstances (modernity, sexual freedom, and analysis paralysis of potential partners) have altered our overall perception and experience of love. My favorite book that has spoken to these topics is Eva Illouz’s Why Love Hurts. It is fascinating.

One of the most interesting and helpful things I’ve learned from this class is the idea of Desire and why desire is such a necessary ingredient for a relationship to stay alive. If you have time, I seriously recommend watching Esther Perel’s “The secret to desire in a long term relationship.” In it, you will find explanations to why people cheat and what needs to be in a relationship for the spark to stay.

My true take-away (since I’m writing this after watching it a good three weeks ago) is that the relationship must be one with two independent players. There is, of course, an element of interdependence, but to keep desire alive, each individual must have access to that which makes him or her happy in and of itself. In order for this to truly happen, I must allow my partner to have the time and space to pursue his interests. It is when I see my guy in his own element–presenting at a conference or speaking to others about ideas he is passionate about–I feel attracted to him because I am able to step back and appreciate him in the way that others are perceiving him at that moment. If another woman is in the room, he immediately becomes more attractive because now there is an element of competition–even though I’ve taken him for granted hundreds of times, if there is the slightest threat of his being taken away, I become possessive. It is this want that is eros, or desire.

My “favorite” way, or the way that seems guaranteed to build desire, is to create some kind of distance between the lover and the beloved. In this space, desire grows as the chasm between the lovers grow. This is why becoming long-distance can be both healthy and detrimental for a couple; if long-distance for a “doable” amount of time (which will be different for everyone), couples will become more infatuated with one another, but if long-distance for too long, you aren’t able to see each other in your elements, and desire dies (sad face).

If it feels as is desire has packed its bags and left the relationship, there is always a way to get it back. It requires a stepping-back, but not necessary a separation. It calls for a deliberate attention to the relationship and reintegration into it–and one of the ways to do that is through the individual. Let me do my thing, I’ll let you do your thing, we’ll admire each other and then do each other ;).
Some tips for creating desire within a long-term relationship:

– Find ways to get intimate in places and spaces that don’t exactly allow such excitement. It’s the stuff teenage romance is made of.

– If you and your partner would be into this sort of thing, go to a bar separately and flirt with others, eventually finding each other. Act as if you’re meeting for the first time. If possible, try not to use inside jokes; make new ones.

– Sometimes a date night isn’t enough, especially if it’s the same ol’ dinner and a movie idea. Do something that neither of you have done before: paint-balling, running a 5K together. Find a new experience and relish the thought of being nervous and outside your comfort zone, but having your comfort holding your hand the whole time.

– Decide to pack up for the weekend and head somewhere new and foreign (even if it’s just 3 hours outside of town).

– Find new recipes, dress up the dinner table and be your best self as you have fun cooking together. If it’s a disaster, ordering in is even more fun in the candle-light.

– Babysitting little ones in the family or friends circles. Stay with me here: when you see your partner interacting with kiddos and you can’t exactly jump his bones in front of them, it certainly increases the desire. Obviously if you’re a parent, this will change.

Do you have any other ideas?

Tags: desire, Esther Perel, Long-distance relationship, love