A Marriage Of Inconvenience

My husband had a best friend since school. I happened to meet them together at a festival, and my husband and I fell in love at first sight. We kissed before we knew each other’s ages and surnames. We moved in together a year later and have been happy ever since.

That was 2003. Life changes, and for thirteen years I’ve been his girlfriend, but basically we are living the married life. Childhood friendships drift apart, but we traditionally invite everybody at least once a year for a very nice Christmas party.

At 30, I decide kids are now or never, and we are soon expecting twins. As we are very unceremonial, but want to avoid legal annoyances, we want to marry before the kids are born. As I am not christened and never missed anything, we do a simple legal wedding at the town house with only our parents and the future godparents for the twins.

We don’t tell anybody, as we feel it unnecessary; I’m pregnant-brained as f*** and don’t want to deal with a big party. We also don’t want people to feel obligated to gift us stuff or money.

Cut to a year later. The twins are born and are a lovely handful. We are stressed beyond belief, but want to celebrate the occasion with friends. We invite everybody and celebrate the kid’s birthday, revealing at the party that we got married. Everybody is happy, we party, and again, life goes on. The kids grow and we are fully occupied with them.

They have just turned three. At their birthday party, one of the godparents asks us what we are doing about the wedding of my husband’s childhood best friend, mentioned earlier. We didn’t even know he was engaged, but we say, “How nice! No, we did not get the card yet! Do tell, when is the wedding?”

He pauses and then very carefully tells us the invite came six months ago, and the wedding is next month. The friend was being childish and wanted to pay us back for not telling him personally about our wedding before we married.

He seriously planned to have the wedding and just tell his wife, sister, and our whole circle of mutual friends that he gave us the invite personally while he just threw it away. He, and I quote him here, wanted to have his wedding and send us a picture afterwards to “see how it feels.”

As our godparent-friend was close with the friend’s sister and future wife, he got a very stern talking to and now we are invited. As we want to make his day special — as he values his wedding day more than we did ours — I am painting something for their special day and we will give some money for their honeymoon.

Still, amazing how petty a man in his forties can be.