"Hey there, Mrs. F--! How's married life?"

Even now, almost three months after the wedding, everyone I see asks me the same question:  "What's it like to be married?"  "How does it feel being married?"  "How's married life?"

And even now, I have only one answer:  "I wouldn't know."

Strange as it may seem, it still hasn't hit me yet.  I know we're married and that we've been married for a decent amount of time now, but I still don't think of myself as a wife or of Daniel as a husband.  In fact, whenever I refer to Daniel, my thought process still goes something like this:  "my...(boyfriend, no, fiance, no) husband..."

And anyone who calls me "Mrs. Hislastnameeventhoughitisminenowtoo" has a decent chance of being punched...or at least glared at.

I just don't think of us as a married couple, even among other married couples.

I'm not exactly sure why this is so hard for me to process.  I think my age is one factor; I still sort of think I'm too young to be married, and that makes it hard to think of myself as married.  But I think the main thing is that nothing has changed.  Really, nothing in our relationship is different.  I thought changing my name might help jolt my brain into realizing we're married, but I guess I don't talk about myself in the third person enough for it to process.

Anyway, I think it's interesting.  I do wonder if my fear that being married would change things (not a big fear, but still something I thought about) has put me in denial.  But I think really, it just doesn't matter that much.  "Married" like "husband" or "wife" is a just a title.  It doesn't mean anything.

Much as I hate how often people quote Shakespeare's "What's in a name" monologue (Names are important.  Deal with it), it does seem to apply here.  Calling our relationship a marriage doesn't actually change it.

Thoughts?  Did it take you a while to think of yourself as "married"?  Do you still not really think of yourselves that way?  Did being married change your relationship?

The Actual Getting Married Part

Through all of the planning for the wedding, it can sometimes be easy to forget about the actual getting married part of getting married.  And so it was a month or so before the wedding that we realized that we actually needed to get a marriage certificate.

It was not hard.  The only kind of weird thing was that we had to go in to the county clerk together to do it.  We brought our check for $79 and our application for a marriage license and left with this:

Personal Photo - Why Yes, I Am an Expert of Taking Photos of Myself (who needs tripods when you have short walls?)

A real, genuine marriage certificate.  All we had to do now was have a ceremony, get some signatures, and send it back to be officially married.

This is the sort of thing that I would expect to take forever, like a DMV line, but we were in and out pretty quick.  I think the key is to go in the morning right after everyone's gotten to work (between 9:30 and 10:30 ideally).

Also, if you're having a friend officiate, we found the Universal Life Church to be the easiest way to get them ordained.  You can do the whole thing online, and it's super fast.

Getting the actual marriage certificate was definitely a little weird.  It was around this point when I started thinking, "Do I really want to do this?"  To me, it's the legal aspect of marriage that makes it real.  But when the day came, I had no lingering doubts, thankfully.  But we'll get to that.  For now, we had done nothing more than check a small but important thing off the list.

What made marriage real for you?  Did you get cold feet at any point?