Getting married in your 40s? I tied the knot for the first time at 42 and there was one thing I stupidly wasted my time worrying about, that I really shouldn’t have given a second’s thought to…
Welcome to our series, The Love Diaries – a space for you to share your experiences, advice, fairy-tale endings, setbacks and heartbreaks. We’ll be hearing from industry experts giving practical advice alongside Capsule readers (You!) sharing your firsthand experiences with love – from the woman who cheated on her husband with a work colleague, one woman’s temptation now the love of her life is finally single (although she’s not), and the woman who forced her husband to choose between her and his girlfriend.
When I said yes to my partner’s proposal and finally got around to planning a wedding a couple of years later, I was very much looking forward to finally tying the knot. But I’m also almost ashamed to say that there was one big obstacle sitting in the way of us having an amazing day:
Me.
I was going to be 42 on our wedding day and when I thought about that fact, a few nasty thoughts/memories fell off the shelves in my mind and clattered to the floor of my now-kind-of-spooked brain.
The first one was a memory of being 30 and being very excited to be a bridesmaid for one of my closest friends. But at some point during a shopping trip to look for bridesmaids’ dresses, I came out of the changing room early and made small talk with the woman who was helping us. She immediately spotted that I had an empty ring finger on my left hand.
“You’re not married, or getting married yourself anytime soon?” she asked.
I nearly gave her a full run down of my love life, but instead just said nope.
“Oh well, you better hurry up,” she said. “There’s nothing worse than an old bride”.
That’s right. NOTHING WORSE THAN AN OLD BRIDE. Nothing.
I’d like to say that I had a great comeback to her, but instead it’s just something I’ve stewed over and thought up countless things to say over the years while I’ve been washing my hair.
But now here I was, a decade later and that little comment was back in my mind. Is 42 old? Too old to be a bride!?!
The smarter, more rational part of my brain was screaming at me that I shouldn’t be giving that throwaway comment a second’s thought, and I’d already wasted enough time thinking about her, but the other part of my brain… well, it was a slightly different story over that side.
Then, on cue, another memory fell off the shelf. This one – weirdly again, because this movie seems to have hit some strange age-related chords for me in the past too – was something that was said in the Sex and the City movie (yet another reason why this film should be scrapped from the history books).
It was when Carrie’s editor at Vogue called her in for a meeting:
“We’re putting together our annual age issue and we’d like you to do 40,” said Enid Frick (played by Candace Bergen, who was one of my female heroes growing up, playing Murphy Brown, the solo mother TV reporter extraordinaire… and actually, yes, now that I’m writing this I understand why it is that I feel so betrayed by the woman who was one of my early feminist role models for having this stupid conversation.)
“Great. Who am I interviewing?” says Carrie.
“No. You, you are 40,” replies Enid. “I want you to be featured in the magazine as the 40-year-old. And here’s the brilliant twist: bride. It will be a sensation. We’re calling it ‘The Last Single Girl’.”
“Well, I’m hardly the last single girl,” laughs Carrie.
“No, but 40 is the last age a woman can be photographed in a wedding gown without the unintended Diane Arbus subtext,” says Enid. (In case that name rang no bells for you, Diane was a photographer who specialised in shooting people considered ‘social deviates’. Coolcoolcool.)
“I thought the issues was ‘Great Style at Every Age,” replies Carrie.
“Style, yes. Bride? No,” says Enid.
Ouch.
So, yes, with these thoughts circling my mind I was feeling some mixed things about our wedding. While I was really excited to get married, I was also feeling quite unenthused about working out what to wear and what kind of “bride” I would be. We were turning our wedding around fairly quickly (we found a date and a venue that worked, just under seven months out), so at that stage there was lots to work out, so I could pretend I had bigger things to worry about than what to wear.
To the point where, when I told Kelly (who counts Say Yes to the Dress as one of her favourite TV shows) that I hadn’t even thought about a dress yet, six months out from the wedding, she looked panicked. Next thing, she was asking if she could call Hera Couture and see if they could possibly squeeze me in, asap.
So, less than 24 hours I was in their beautiful K-Road store. It felt dreamy and magical and from the moment we’d walked in, I’d been treated like a queen, but still, something in the back of my mind was uneasy.
“Remember, you don’t have to buy anything,” a friend, who sensed my nervousness, told me before I’d headed to the appointment. “Just have fun! Try on some pretty dresses!”
I tried on a dress – a halterneck style with a similar feel to the one that Meghan Markle wore to their wedding reception.
I loved it. I felt like a princess. But still, standing there in front of Kelly, the lovely Laura from Hera, as well as the designer (and wizard?!) herself, wonderful Katie Yeung, I twisted my hands and heard myself say, “Ok, but can we be honest. Am I too old for this? Do I look like an old bride?”
As soon as I heard myself say it, I realised I had let bloody Enid Fink and that changing room lady get to me and I was being neurotic. But thankfully, before I could even finish my lines of questioning, my words were being drowned out by Kelly, Laura and Katie – who looked at me as if I was absolutely insane. “What the hell are you talking about?!” said Katie, looking genuinely confused and alarmed. “What would make you think that? Are we looking in the same mirror?!?!”
Suddenly I stopped looking at myself through this strange ‘you’re too old’ lens that I had created.
I tried on another dress that I’d liked the pictures of but had thought it wouldn’t suit me or, yip, would be ‘too young’ for me to wear. It became my new favourite.
Suddenly I felt like I was in a fashion montage scene from a cute wedding rom-com trying on beautiful gowns.
Laura and Katie then put their heads together in the corner and came back over to me with a dress in their hands they thought I should try on. Before I walked in the door, I wouldn’t have looked twice at it. It was called ‘Amina’ and it was beautiful. Classy, but sexy. It had a vintage kind of feel to it, with an exposed corset, a rose brocade, but with spaghetti straps, and a thigh high split. Laura was quick to point out that she could lower the split though – not because I couldn’t or shouldn’t expose so much leg, but that, like I’d said, I was going to be wrangling a toddler on the day so a split toooo high wouldn’t quite work.
I put it on and it was… perfect?
It fit me like a glove and was this perfect blend of classy vintage, and sexy (Yes, a 40 something is allowed to be sexy thankyouverymuch Hollywood). Next thing I knew, I was asking to try on A VEIL. Who was I?!
When I got home, I flicked through photos of myself in the dresses and, I could actually tell from looking at them which photos had taken before I said my piece about worrying I was too old, and which were after. I stood taller, I smiled more, I looked more relaxed once I’d gotten out of my own goddam way.
And so I sent Laura a message right away and told her to lock me in for buying the Amina – I’d be in to pay a deposit asap.
Six months later I put on the dress on my wedding day and not at one point, at any second of that day did I have a thought about my age. All I felt was so very, very lucky to be there, to be marrying my husband, to have our kids there to cheer and throw confetti, to be surrounded by close family and friends and to feel so surrounded by so much love and joy.
And you know what? I also felt like I looked pretty darn good.
I’m so pleased I didn’t let myself (or Enid or the damn changing room lady) get in my way of having my bride moment.
