Reflections on (Nearly) a Year of Marriage

I’ve been married for 11 months, which is close to a year, so we’re rounding a bit here. Overall, it’s been great! We lived together for over two years prior to marriage, so there weren’t any big surprises. I also happened to marry the most patient man alive. He doesn’t yell. Ever. I yell plenty, but he literally never yells back! So that makes things pretty wonderful. 

The thing that has really stood out the first year are the questions I get, so I’m going to answer the most common ones!

1. How was the wedding? It was good. It was a wedding. I had a great time, but it was a pretty standard wedding- pretty dress, nice tux, happy tears, food, drinks, dancing, cake. Both of our families are wonderful, so there were no drunken brawls or dramatic events. The biggest issue was the wind blew over the chuppah when we were setting up, but the rabbi had one and it worked great. I’m super grateful that so many people loved us enough to come and celebrate. And even more grateful that no one was weird or inappropriate and everyone had a good time.
2. How is married life? Exactly like unmarried life, only with more jewelry and tax benefits.
3. What did you do for your honeymoon? We didn’t. Not really. We will eventually, but it’ll just be a cool trip. We’ve done a lot of cool stuff this year, and I’ll get to those adventures eventually. I didn’t want to do a big trip right after the wedding- planning a wedding is a lot of work. So is planning a big trip- at least the way I do it. So I didn’t want to worry about planning another big thing. We went to Palm Springs, stayed in a mediocre hotel, but it was free in exchange for sitting through a timeshare presentation. I’ll do another blog about timeshares sometime- they’re an adventure. We did do some fun stuff- we drove in to LA (3 hours with traffic) and spent the day at Universal Studios- Harry Potter World is awesome and we had a giant pink frosted donut a la the Simpsons. We also ate wedding cake every night. I had not intended to save the top tier of our cake- in large part because it was big and I planned for people to eat it. But it got saved and given to us at the end of the night, so we threw it in a cooler and brought it with us. We did not bring forks, but luckily the hotel had sporks- so spork wedding cake it was! And it was really good cake!
4. What is your name now? Did you change your name? Are you changing your name?  It’s Conway still. No.No

4.5 Why not? How come? This one is a longer answer, so get ready. TL;DR answer: I don’t want to. Longer answer: I don’t want to, but for a variety of reasons. 

1- I go by my last name. I work in a high school, I AM Ms Conway (or Miss or Conway and once in a while Ms Kan-yay). I hear my last name far more than my first name. I answer my phone by saying “This is Conway”. I earned both degrees as Conway as well.

2- EVERYTHING is in my name. House, cars, bills, degrees, credit cards, you name it.

3- Laziness is a small reason too… Changing your name is a ton of work! I don’t want to do it.

4- My last name is really easy to spell and pronounce. People don’t screw it up very often (I get Conally more than you’d think), but everyone can say it. It’s easy!

5- Mitch is Jewish. His last name is Jewish. I am not Jewish. It felt a little weird to potentially take on a name with cultural significance that is not mine. I know people do it all the time, and that’s fine, but it didn’t feel right for me.

6- No one has asked Mitch this question! This is where I could rant about patriarchy, but we’ll leave that for another time.

7- And ultimately I just don’t want to. I like my name and I don’t want to change it. I’m positive I can have a happy, productive marriage and not have the same last name of my husband. 

In conclusion, married life is pretty great, would recommend. At least if you happen to be married to Mitch.