The Bride

Radiant in white, the bride’s joyful smile reflects love’s rosy dawn, the start of a glorious new chapter. Surrounded by majestic peaks touched by the sun’s fading rays, she stands expectant, innocently unaware of all that may come.

In her heart springs hope, a reservoir of faith in happily ever afters. She believes wholeheartedly that the joy of this moment will persist in domestic bliss, that the passionate romance will endure unchanged by time’s erosive hands.

Yet life cannot sustain a permanent honeymoon. Even soulmates have their seasons – trials that test the resilience of love’s tender shoots. During inescapable storms, will they cling together for dear life or be torn apart? Will they drown in a sea of misery?

The naïve bride does not foresee how ideals meet reality, how her heart will rage and ache. That quiet compromises build brick by brick until the fortress of resentment is complete. How communication frays as they dwell in separate rooms of pain.

But she also cannot conceive the profound intimacy forged by weathering life’s travails hand in hand. The empathy nurtured by truly knowing another’s private burdens. The everyday acts of care that rebuild bonds gently, slowly. The red thread of fate ever binds though often knotted and tangled.

So on this golden day, innocence still reigns. The beaming bride brims with love pure and untested. Let this moment infuse her memory with enough magic to sustain through the darkest passages. To reignite passion when it smoulders low. To keep the fire burning when it seems to have diminished.

May she have the courage to do what it takes to tend the fragile flame, to see this commitment through. And when she emerges weathered yet wiser on the journey’s far shore, may she turn back with bittersweet fondness to gaze upon her trusting, radiant younger self, here pausing at the precipice.

It is an act of courage to take the risk on love. In any relationship, there is always the prospect of getting hurt. Nothing is guaranteed and yet it is better to savour the moment when love burns brightest rather than to expect the worst. Even when it dims, there is a glow that can be more beautiful than before. In its gentle luminescence, we see each other clearly, the known and unknowable, unified as one.