An invitation to love loudly

👋 I know, I know. I’ve had a two-week hiatus, and it’s not even a Sunday. Sorry about that. But I didn’t want to wait until next week to post this, so happy Monday! I hope you all have a wonderful week.

Now, let’s talk about love, baby.

At the ripe old age of 30, weddings are very much a part of the annual leave schedule.

You’re paying out for accommodation in God knows where, your feet ache from heels, you’re likely eating a menu option you’d never order in real life, and if you do it right, your hangover will probably last around three days.

But, when it comes down to it, none of those things really matter. It’s worth the killer hangover to celebrate what counts. And the one thing I’ve learnt about myself in the past few years, is that I love to love loudly.

Last weekend was my seventh wedding in just over a year, and it happened to be that of my best friend, Charlotte.

I met Charlotte eleven years ago, during a very hazy first week at university. Between attending events and meeting everyone in our block of flats, we struck up a friendship that was sealed (very literally) in a shared bathroom cubicle. Mid-wee, she mentioned she was from a town just 20 minutes from my family home.

So naturally, the only thing to do was to become best friends.

In the years since, Charlotte and I have lived together, have lived 10,000 miles apart. We’ve eaten our weight in pasta, drunk more Rioja than I care to admit, and sat in the car for hours on end without a minute of silence. The day after her first date with her now-husband, she drove to my family home to tell me all about it, and 10 years later, both of our partners are now used to being the third and fourth wheels to our yapping, our love of dinosaurs, and our pure joy of just being in each other’s company.

But, while I would absolutely love to harp on and on about my huge fucking obsession with Charlotte (please DM me if you would like a short essay on that), this love story has so much more to it.

I’m going to put my hand up and say that I am a gal with a wedding Pinterest board. 🙋‍♀️🙋‍♀️🙋‍♀️ I’ve had it since 2013. Yes, my boyfriend knows about it, no, he has not seen it.

But despite that, loving loudly hasn’t always been easy. As anyone who has spent a good chunk of their life navigating dating apps will know.

Over the single years of my 20s, I learnt the hard way (more than once) that people have become disposable.

Thanks to Hinge, and Tinder, and Bumble, and Feeld, and Thursday, and GOD KNOWS what else is out there now, connection is gamified. You can have the best date ever, but then go home, look at your Hinge, and discover you have a new match that looks pretty hot, and hey, what’s the harm in sending them a message too?!

I hate to say it, but the stereotype of our generation being afraid of commitment is real and, honestly, pretty unavoidable. Modern dating is not for the weak, and I deleted my own dating apps (and then, of course, redownloaded them) more times than I care to admit.

There was a real drought of coupling up in my mid-to-late twenties. It felt like everyone met at university or before 23, and then nobody was meeting anybody, and I was watching the impact of dating apps play out in real life. Throw in a global pandemic, and I’d really lost faith in the idea of romantic love for myself.

Spoiler: I was only 27, so I might have been a little overdramatic.

But when you’re the only single one in your friendship group, or you’re surrounded by people who met the loves of their life at 20, you really need to shoulder some of the ‘why not me’ to celebrate other people’s happiness. And I did work at it. I am a BIG believer in the fact that if you can’t get a grip for two minutes to share in somebody else’s success, then you need to work on being a better friend.

But there are obviously times in life when celebrating specific occasions can be a little bit harder. And being on the back end of a terrible relationship with no hope for the dating world doesn’t exactly make you the life and soul of the bouquet toss.

So I won’t pretend that when I met my partner, loving loudly in the face of romance didn’t become a little bit easier. (Side note: I really, really, REALLY, had to resist writing this whole article about him, because I am so fucking in love now.)

But, in the midst of connections that are fleeting and disposable, weddings had always been my proof that love existed.

Not just the romantic kind, but love in all of its messy, loud, unstoppable forms. Weddings are the rare place you find every kind of love in one room, and that love is deafening.

Last weekend, loving loudly was hearing how many times Charlotte’s dad had rewritten his speech, and how her brother had Googled the perfect speed per line for his poem.

Loving loudly was our friend Lizzie flying over from Australia for all of the celebrations. It was me and the heavily pregnant maid of honour, Katy, on our hands and knees in the grass, underneath Charlotte’s dress, bustling it up so that she could dance the night away.

It was our friend Helly, attending the wedding and leaving just after the first dance to catch her international flight to her new job abroad. And loving loudly was hearing my own mum, who they’d asked personally to officiate the wedding, pronounce Charlotte and Alex as husband and wife.

I truly believe that every day of annual leave used, every blister on your feet, and even that dreaded hangover, it’s all so worth it.

Because how lucky are we to be invited into a room where the love is so loud?