Beyond Happily Ever After

Overview

On my wedding day, I parachuted into my wedding and landed on a sheep. The sheep was fine. The marriage was not.

In skydiving training, they don’t teach emergency procedures after something goes wrong. They drill them into you when everything is going perfectly. Jump after jump, when the sky is clear and there is no reason to expect trouble. Muscle memory has to be there before you need it. You cannot build it during freefall when your canopy fails.

Beyond Happily Ever After is for couples in a great place. You have found your person and are convinced this relationship will last. If anything could be better, it might only be that you wish you had more time together. Work and life can sure get in the way. But you have plenty of time though, right?

Possibly.

So why not do whatever you can to make sure it lasts? You buy phone screen protectors and car insurance. What are you doing to protect your relationship? The habits that sustain a great relationship cannot be built during freefall. They have to be in place before you need them.

I learned that the hard way. At twenty-five, I was told I had six months to live. Focus sharpened. I told people I loved them. Stopped pretending to like people I didn’t. Took risks. Stopped procrastinating and wasting time.

I lived into the second six-month window. Sped past the third. And the next. Forty years passed. Until I was told by a doctor that a massive mistake had been made. The diagnosis had been incorrect and I had never needed the brain surgery and the terminal diagnosis had been human error. They expected me to be delighted that I was “getting my life back” as they called it.

I was devastated.

The urgency which had sharpened my focus disappeared. Drift returned. I stopped taking risks. Since time now yawned into an undefined future, I put things off till later. My relationships and mental health suffered. I took lots of naps. Scrolled on my phone. Did a lot of online shopping.

Until I realized this life I had been gifted was not one I wanted. So I gave it back and recreated what had worked from my six-month life. I bent creativity and time constraints to my will. And it worked. Drift reversed.

As a wedding officiant in British Columbia, I stand with hundreds of couples at the moment they make their most sincere promises; in pretend video games or Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, on ski hills, mountain tops and pontoons, in boats or helicopters. Their promises are heartfelt. I hope we stay in love … I hope we continue growing and changing … I hope we keep communicating well. These couples believe what they have will last. This is the exact moment to do that elusive “relationship work” we’ve all heard about. But “work” sounds hard, takes time, and doesn’t sound like fun.

Right? Wrong. All you need is variety within stability to replace hope as a strategy.

Beyond Happily Ever After complements books like Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks and Alain de Botton’s The Course of Love. It is not therapy, self-help, or relationship repair. Nothing you have is broken.

Blending memoir, observation, and practical insight, Beyond Happily Ever After explores small creative ways to interrupt drift before it becomes structural. Because what you have right now is worth protecting. Bring your future relationship forward. Before you need to.