I had a Bloody Mary on the trip up to the top of the mountain in the gondola. I made it, I brought it, I drank it.
I got married in Kansas when it still only sold alcohol by the drink in “private clubs”. My half of the wedding party (mostly my brothers) decided they needed a drink after pictures but before the ceremony. They wandered into a pretty rough-looking club and ordered a round. The bartender told them he couldn’t serve them as they weren’t members. A regular looked at the 6 guys and told him that he doubted that the liquor control board was sending out folks tuxes on stings. They got their drinks.
!!!.. Oh, right, you’re referring to the marriage ceremony, aka “wedding”.
I had forgotten the context of this specific discussion and had to scroll back through the thread to realize that no, you’re not talking about high-headcount polyamory here. 
Oh yeah, the ceremony. My wife and I have been married for 26 years, no problems there.
I don’t know how untrue it is, but I certainly wouldn’t look at someone’s mother or father and decide whether it was a good idea to marry their child. I know my mother made a conscious decision to be different from her father when it came to raising her children. My mother didn’t call us stupid or lunkhead like grandpa did his children growing up. But as I’ve grown older and wiser (ha ha), I recognize some of my grandather in her parenting style and personality.
Hell, I can recognize both my in-laws in my wife. Mrs. Odesio made a conscious decision to avoid being like her father by paying for basic maintenance on the house and her car instead of redneck jury rigging like her dad did. I can even recognize my own father in myself in both how I look and behave.
If you grow up in a household where dad treats mom like shit you might just accept it as the way things are. So little Susie just accepts it as normal that her boyfriend is verbally abusive because that’s how it is at home. Every relationship is like that, right? Or maybe little Johnny treats his girlfriend like shit because that’s what dad does to mom. And dad loves mom, right?
Some people recreate their parents’ worst flaws and others do everything they can to be as unlike their parents as humanly possible.
I’m one of the latter sort. Now that I have a child, I can’t fathom some of the things my parents did. It breaks my brain that anyone could treat a child that way. Or a partner, for that matter.
I recognize that, even though I have made a Herculean effort to be different than my parents, there are many ways in which I am still similar: sometimes by nature, sometimes by culture. It’s a lifelong journey to mitigate the worst of it.
Of the last three women I lived with (and the last I married), none are like their mothers, or have become more like them with the passage of time. Only tiny bits here and there, but the personalities, interests, and yes, even looks, are nothing alike.
I read this too fast as
I got married in a very formal three piece tailcoat suit & top hat in the single stall mens toilet in a dive bar in a small village . . .
There are quirks, kinks and downright weird shit, but the toilet would have been a little crowded.
Although if I ever get married again, there is, in fact, a free public lavatory in the suburb where I live, so I will consider that venue.
It is right next to a public park area, so ideal for the reception. Except homeless people live in the lavatory, which could become awkward.
As a kid, I saw an interview with an old couple a-settin’ on the porch: “What’s the secret to a happy 60-year marriage?”
“Waaall, we go out twice a week… I go out Tuesdays. She goes out Fridays.”
I just got back from a solo cross-country train trip. My wife had just as much enjoyment by having a break.
That’s funny. And also true.
Hard to do that with a small child, though.
During the happier early years of my marriage, my ex would very occasionally go to weekend-long festivals, leaving me in charge of very young kids, with my blessing. (One year old, and a three year old)
She got to have fun with her friends.
I got to be dad. 100% dad.
Some of my most precious moments, although I don’t tell her that.
That sounds like a Henny Youngman one-liner. 
I’m going on a pleasure trip this week - I’m taking her to the airport!
My parents have been married for 63 years. My sister and I held a big party for them for their 50th; at that, my father said, to their assembled friends: “We’ve been happily married for 30 years. Which isn’t bad, considering that we’ve been married for 50 years overall.”
Yeah, I keep meaning to do something like that. It’s not that my husband would be opposed, we’re just busy as hell, so entire months can go by before we think of doing it. We have this goal to go out together once a month and it’s usually every three or four months. It’s just so easy to get buried in the minutia of your daily life and miss out on the big picture.
53 years married here. My younger brother was married for 10 years and asked me:..’What happened to all the sexy times?'“ I told him that the frequency goes down slowly but never quite ends. Fast forward 20 years & I learned that by 65 you have to get pretty creative and have a toybox if you want to keep her interested. Worst case scenario is if you marry a younger woman. That would be brutal. I think all in all I have had abetter life than I would have had single, and I do have kids and G-kids.
heh. My wife and I recently retired, bought a bigger house which is kinda different than many retired folks.
We knew we would both be home more so we wanted our space. We both understand that. Though we do spend hours playing chess and darts together, pretty much daily. I did some rough calculations, and since the start of COVID we have played about 4000 games of chess. Gonna start a garden too.
That’s amazing. My marriage is going well, and we do argue quite a bit. It fluctuates: some months we argue too often and/or too strongly, other months only occasionally. Not a good thing (especially for our kid)…but…
Four out of our seven closest couple friends (some neighbors, others parents of our kids’ friends) have gotten divorced over the past five years…and it was our impression that they didn’t seem to argue enough. Upper Midwestern calm, taken to an extreme. Maybe we’re wrong, but in some cases, it seems a bit of communicative frisson is better than stony reserve.
Nevertheless, congrats. That’s very rare, I’m sure.
(By the way, as you may know, I’ve used GIS professionally for decades as well, though not as often as you do. Often, my arguments with my mife are about clarity – she gets mad if I ask her to restate something more precisely or clearly. I guess she’s more raster, and I’m more vector…)