OK, so I am starting my writing for pleasure journey here on Substack and you’ve got to start somewhere, right? So, to get the ball rolling, I’m posting something I wrote a while back. Am I cheating already?
Five years ago, my son and his wife to be gave me the honour of giving a reading during their wedding ceremony. After Googling “wedding readings” and “poems for weddings” and wading through an endless quagmire of cheesy, cringeworthy prose and stuff that was totally devoid of any soul, I decided that the only option was to write something myself. And here it is …
It’s nice to share
When we're small children our parents tell us "It's nice to share".
This seems like a crazy idea to us at first, but we soon learn to share our favourite toys, our best friends and our packet of sweets - and we learn that this means that other children like us, and we always have friends to play with.
As we grow older, we run with the sharing thing.
We learn to share our time and our adventures. We learn to share our likes and our dislikes, who we fancy and who to be wary of. We share phone numbers and photos, jokes and stories. Homework and ID documents. Some things we later regret sharing, but that's all part of the learning process.
Then we're suddenly adults and what we're sharing is more meaningful.
Now we're sharing our thoughts and our feelings, our problems and our successes. We might be sharing a bank account and a home. We share our hopes and our fears. And, sometimes, with those closest to us, we might even share our secrets. This means we get to enjoy emotional connections with our friends and loved ones.
All these years of learning how to be liked, and then how to be loved, inevitably draw that special someone to us. We fall in love and we want to get married.
On our wedding day we agree to share with our soulmate the most important and valuable thing we have - our self. And, loving us as much as we love them, they agree to do the same.
After a lifetime of practice, sharing our stuff, our stories and our feelings we're now ready to share the rest of our life. We'll share our destiny with the one special person who we know will care about it as much as we do. Two individuals become one, shared person. It's the scariest but most magical commitment we will ever make. The reward is a future full of joy that only couples can know.
And later, we might be blessed with a child. We've shared our genes and brought a new, person into the world. One day, not long after, we'll catch ourselves gently telling them "It's nice to share".
I hope you enjoyed this first post. I enjoyed doing it and it feels great to get started. If you are as intrigued as I am to know what I will write next, please subscribe to get future content.
Welcome to Substack! My wife and I are in the thick of the sharing conversations with our 1 and 3 year old boys, so it made me smile thinking about one day reflecting on this phase of life as you have. Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to more :)