Issue 19.10
Let’s talk about the wedding,reception and the honeymoon. We were married at the end of summer in 1964 in the Salt Lake temple which at that time had limited sealing rooms. The temple extension had not yet been built. Our wedding was the day after school ended at BYU. There were 90 other happy couples to be married that day. We entered the temple at 7 am with our family and friends hoping to have a wedding brunch around 11 am at the nearby Hotel Utah. The only problem was because of the backlog of weddings scheduled that day;we didn’t get out of the temple till around 5 pm. My mom,the brunch hostess,who was trying to wait patiently outside the temple until we appeared,was beside herself. That should have been my first clue that this marriage was not going to be a smooth journey.
Our reception was the next evening at the newly finished but now demolished BYU Alumni House. All went smoothly there until the reception line formed and my cowboy cousin Bill came through the line. He wanted to talk privately with the groom. Seemed he really wanted to kidnap my new husband,then he talked me into leaving my reception to go and retrieve my husband. Looking back now,I probably should have told him to save me lots of problems and just keep my new husband,but I didn’t know what I know now.
We started married life as poor graduate students with a one bedroom apt in Provo,no furniture and less cash. A honeymoon? It was spent painting second hand furniture we had bought from Deseret Industries and setting up our first “home sweet home” with other furniture loaned to us from my new in-laws’ rental apartments.
We were happy during the first months of our new marriage as we learned about our new and permanent roommate. Somehow,though,living 24/7 with the same person of the opposite sex is not the same as having college roommates. We as newlyweds shared everything from the same tube of toothpaste to laundry chores. We discovered the local Laundromat and spend many weekend hours not dating but doing our laundry together. It had to be done. Dating was over for the time,this was real life and not meant to be easy but no one had told us that before we married.
