So, it’s already one month since we got married. I was not in the position to post anything until some time passes in order calm down and rethink everything, so I believe that now it is the right time to share some thoughts and emotions.
First of all, I am happy like I don’t know what… I am happy in general and in every detail. Completely!
Second thing is that nothing really changed that much (as many people expect it to be). I was happy before I got married, I am happy now. We were living together before marriage for some time, so no surprise here as well. The biggest change that I might thing of is that now I have one more reason/excuse to use in tricky situations to tell someone to leave us alone, and probably, most of the people who might bother us with up to that extend already realized I have something to tell them and left us alone… (nothing personal here, just a matter of having more control over situations and less reasons for such things to come up).
Now a bit about the process of getting married.
I would emphasize on three major aspects during preparations to our marriage: bureaucracy, politics, general arrangments.
Bureaucracy is something I really hate and don’t really understand. People complicated their lives too much. Sometimes one need to get a paper to certify another paper that is, in it’s turn, certifies yet another paper telling something simple and obvious. All this takes a lot of time, nerves, money, efforts and whatever else it might take to get it. In our case it was even more complicated due to the fact that 3 countries were involved with all their laws and traditions: Russia, Ukraine, Cyprus. And the problem here is conflicts. We had cases when one country demands a paper from another one, while the last does not provide that paper anymore. While Russian-Cyprus relations are pretty much OK, and all paper work here took one trip to Nicosia and 10 minutes + EURO 10 in Russian embassy, I can’t tell the same about Ukrainian-Cyprus cooperation. In particular, Cyprus government establishments a requesting a paper from Ukraine, that is not provided by the last since 2007 or so. We made quite a few trips to Nicosia and talked long with Ukrainian council trying to sort out the issue, but at the end, Yana had to travel to Ukraine to get the papers from the government, as well as a letter from a lawyer, explaining all related changes in the Ukrainian laws, providing all the reasons why the papers demanded by Cyprus government could not be provided anymore, and which types of papers are similar and valid these days. This all really sucks. I know that laws are made to protect everyone and to avoid tricky situations, but sometimes I really think that it would be much easier to live without all this crap. Finally, it is very hard to plan anything as no one cane predict how long which paper will take to be issued and what else would be needed to support that paper.
Politics… Yet another thing I hate and consider as useless bullshit game people often get involved into. We had to plan a lot of things and we had to make sure that most of the people surrounding us will be satisfied. It is impossible to make everyone happy. So to the best effort make most of people satisfied is something we were looking at. On the other hand, we had our own expectations, wishes and so on, which we wanted to come true. The first thing I had to state to almost everyone: It is our wedding, we are having this great event in our life and we are inviting people who are close to us to share all these feelings with us. So as it is our event – we were to organize it the way we want, and this was a priority. If there were something not important to us, but what would make more people to feel better, of-course we would added to the list, but not more than that. Obviously there were many tries from all sides to add something more to the list, or change something, but we managed to do most of the things the way we saw them. On the other side we have changed something in the initial scenario as we realized that initial though would not just work. All over I think we managed to complete this task correctly and we heard a lot of positive feedback afterwards, while we, ourselves, were satisfied with the wedding as well.
Finally, when it came to general arrangements, I want to say that the first thing you do – count on yourself. Of-course, a lot of people want to help and they really do so (great thanks to everyone who helped us in all the ways with our wedding, really appreciated), but the point is that it is always better to count only on ourselves and if any help comes – that great, but if not – it is ok, as it was not planned. Do not think that someone will just take over something and do it from start to end, you need to control the process, have all the things in your mind or better somewhere in a written form. There are to many things that we just didn’t think of, and no one did for us as well, so we had to fix them as all was going on. Normally I never use written notes or plans myself, but this time, especially in the last days before the event, I had to write a lot of things and have someone be nearby to follow the list and remind me every 5 minutes about upcoming planned things. One more advice to anyone who might need it: it is good to have a general scenario about how things might go, but you should assume from the beginning that the end result will be different. Something will definitely go wrong and just in another way. If you expect something to go one way to much, you will end-up upset and messed up when it doesn’t go that one, while when you are pretty flexible, sometimes you enjoy the other way even more that you would think of. Try to stick to original plan, but make life bring alterations to that plan.
So that was about preparations. The event itself was very good and we liked everything a lot. We had quite a number of guests. Some of them were coming to Cyprus days before the event and staying for few days after which gave us even more good time and emotions. A lot of positive stuff, a lot of pictures on my flickr page, a lot of support from friends and relatives. It worth it all.