The Secret I Kept From My Wife Until Our Wedding Day

[Music] he he's just going for a pee we'll wait I think I can start without him but he's going to walk in behind me it's going to be weird I I'll I'll start and if he does walk in we'll just phase it out um if this should take 7 and 1 half minutes if I don't cry and if I do cry it could be it could be anything I don't know um first and foremost thank you all so much for being here today um a special thanks to those of you who have had to travel

far to attend we had to pick between having the celebration here in California or in England and we are very aware that many of you you have had to spend a lot of money traveling hundreds even thousands of miles to be here and it really means a lot um to the slight majority of you who haven't had to spend a lot of money getting here today don't be afraid to keep those Savings in mind when making a donation to our honeymoon fund we wouldn't hold it against you that's all I'm saying uh I have joked

with SOI for months that it would be cute for me to he's back he's back good uh there there are other doors but we'll go with that one um that it would be cute for me to learn a few words in Korean to sprinkle into my speech but I looked at the Korean alphabet and I realized it wasn't going to be the easy tasks that I had hoped so please forgive me um for how much I will butcher this so for for [Music] regret for everyone who doesn't speak Korean let's just pretend the pronunciation was

perfect um our relationship has been quite unconventional uh due to the geographical distance between our two countries uh we didn't really have the opportunity to start dating slowly to see how things went uh a few years ago when I left England I told my family there was a girl I had feelings for and I needed to roll the dice and see if something special was there so I packed one single suitcase said some very emotional goodbyes and left for America I thought I was going to be here for one or two weeks maybe a month

tops if things went really really well but that was kind of the last they saw of me I fell in love hard and and thanks to a whirlwind romance added pandemic related travel restrictions and incompatible visa restrictions our relationship was expedited and we became Inseparable traveling from country to Country to Country just to make sure that we could stay together the more time we spent here in California the more we built our lives here making some amazing new friends and spending more time with so his family and back in England my old best friends and

my family were still there where it felt like my old life was still waiting for me although we are already married today was super important for both of us because today is the first and the only day ever that all of you who we love from both sides of the pond and Canada will come together in one place and it means the world to us that you all here so thank you for that um [Applause] I remember being 30 years old sitting with my sister having a heart-to- heart about life and I told her that

I would never get married weddings were very big very expensive days all for a single piece of paper that doesn't even really change anything about your relationship I spent 32 years of my life feeling totally ambivalent about marriage and then I met soie and everything changed I don't know whether it was her spontaneous dance bursts in the kitchen her uninhibited contagious laugh or the most beautiful smile I have ever seen but she made me feel things that I just don't know how to put into words I immediately knew that this was something special and unpronounced

to our amilies we actually talked about getting married before we were even officially in a relationship we hadn't been on our first proper date yet and somehow we were still planning our lives together talking about where we were going to live and what color tiles we would have in our kitchen when we eventually told our families we were going to a lope it seemed like a rushed decision our families rightfully asked us for reassurance that we knew what we were doing my family asked me if I was sure but truth be told I had never

felt more sure about anything in my life I had spent my entire life being a marriage skeptic and then I met someone who turned all of that around in an instant there was nothing I looked forward to more than marrying soie not just once but twice uh so he described red our relationship brilliantly a few months ago we were lying in bed holding hands joking around like we normally do and she said to me do you remember when you were a kid and you had a sleepover at a friend's house and you just stayed up

late just giggling together well every single day with you feels like that because she is not just my wife she is my best friend she is my happy place she is the person who makes me laugh more than anyone else on the planet the person who turned my entire life around in an instant and the person who makes me feel a type of love that I didn't even know existed marrying her is easily the single greatest achievement of my life marrying her is easily the single greatest achievement in my life and I am honored to

have the privilege of spending the rest of my years striving to be the husband that she deserves please do me the immense honor of raising your glasses to soie [Music] all