We’re coming up on a week since my son Pete and Marissa got married and, I have to say, it was a damn good wedding. Now, I don’t have the depth of experience of the average 27-year-old, who has been to 19 weddings in the past 8 months, but even so, trust me, it was good. I mean, look above.

My favorite part was seeing how happy Pete and Marissa were. And how happy everybody was for them. But mostly them, because everybody else, even Virginia and me, are just everyone else.

Sometime in the past four years Pete and Marissa did that couple thing where they found each other’s backs, flattened themselves against each other and, after a while, there was no daylight between them. That’s a good thing.

The wedding was Friday and we held the rehearsal dinner Thursday night, at Sedona Taphouse in Phoenixville, where we put 47 people in a super-tight room and lived to tell about it. (Somehow, we have yet to hear a report of a covid case following the rehearsal dinner and 190-guest wedding. There were fears …)

I was privileged to welcome everyone to both the rehearsal dinner and the reception. I shared some thoughts at the rehearsal dinner (I was smart enough to know the reception was not the time nor place):

Weddings are act openers and closers. They are beginnings and endings in our lives. And so, as we reach the end of this beginning, I want to say this to Pete and Marissa: You have begun magnificently.

 A relationship is a lot of things, and people spend a lot of money on books and therapists and other things to try to improve and fix and save and recover from them, but I’d suggest “relationship” is simply an action: it’s a turning to each other. Over and over. Until you, or it, end. And watching you two first turn to each other (I was there at the start), and do it again, and again, and then to get better at, and to trust it, that has been a parent’s special privilege and a joy.

Tomorrow is the beginning of the middle, and I am excited for it because you’ve got the movement down. Trust it, it’ll take you far.

There’s much more to say, but let’s leave it here for now. If you want to see photos, you can look at these on Facebook (Marissa, Virginia, me), search #IDoDonahue on Instagram, or check out the gallery below that takes you from Thursday to the post-wedding brunch Saturday at our house.