Wednesday Wedding Day - Less than 2 months, can I wig out yet?

Yesterday marked 2 months until we get married.

On the one hand, we've been together for over six and a half years. It's not like we're jumping the gun on getting married or anything - in fact, I bet a lot of people who know us wonder why we waited this long. And most of the wedding stuff is done, planned, taken care of, and those things that aren't are either going to be last minute (as in, taking place during the week before the wedding) or are currently in progress.

On the other hand, holy crap, it's less than two months until we get married! I feel like there's so much still to do, so many little detail-y things. Our invitations got sent out last week, and we've gotten a lot of positive feedback (Dan spent countless hours working on them). In fact, I have a little fluttery stomach moment every time his email client dings, because it means it might be an RSVP. Even though we have a pretty good idea who is coming and who isn't, I'm still really excited about it. Once we know for sure who is coming, there will be a few more projects to do. But since we now have the major things figured out, and many of the minor ones, I'm not feeling completely overwhelmed.

I've talked a lot about the wedding over the last few months (and in two weeks, we'll have been engaged for a year, so I've had a long time to think about it) but I haven't talked much about how I feel about getting married. I guess for me, it's a natural progression of a relationship that began many years ago. I moved to Colorado with a pretty good idea somewhere in my mind that we'd end up at this point eventually (otherwise, I wouldn't have spent a year and a half flying back and forth and conducting the bulk of relationship over the phone/internet). It was a leap of faith, sure, but I had a feeling from the very beginning that this could be a permanent deal. I was only 22 when Dan and I got together, so I wasn't willing to entertain the idea of "forever" at that point. It took a few years of us dealing with all of the things that life threw at us before I came around and started thinking that hey, yeah, maybe we should get married. I think it took Dan a little bit longer than that. I'm really excited for the wedding, to have so many of our friends and family all in one place to celebrate this thing we've created together, to have it documented for posterity. But in all honesty, in some ways I've felt married for quite some time - perhaps since we got engaged or even before. We committed to each other at some point in the years we've lived together, so the wedding is just a way to make it clear to society and community that hey, we're in it for the long haul.

Perhaps the most visible symbol of our new status of husband and wife is that after we're married we're going to share a last name, which is important to both of us. I'm not changing my name to his, and he isn't changing his name to mine; we're both changing our last names to a new name that combines letters from each of our current names. I'm not especially attached to mine, and don't particularly like his. He feels about the same way. Years before we got engaged, we started talking about what we might do with our names if we got married, and this idea came up at least two years ago. We've both had quite some time to get used to the idea and then both got really excited about it. We're lucky in that our names mesh pretty well together to create a name we both like. At some point during the ceremony, our rockstar officiant is going to say something about our new name, and why we chose to change to that name. I'm sure there will be people who don't understand why we would want to do what we're doing, but you know what? It's our names, and our decision. I can't wait to be a Stryker.