How being a wedding photographer can negatively affect your marriage

I wanted to get real tonight and write something that has been on my mind lately- how being a wedding photographer affects your marriage.  Until this job, I can say none of my jobs have really had any impact on my relationship with my husband. As a teenager I worked in retail, when we first got married in 2007 that continued until I finished my degree, and as a paralegal I just did my job and came home. Even starting out as a photographer, nothing really changed. But if you are a wedding photographer in a relationship, I am willing to bet you can agree with what I'm about to say.Being a wedding photographer has a big potential to hurt your own marriage if you aren't careful. I have learned this and have had to learn to overcome it.Here's the thing, relationships don't stay in the happy forever great wonderful stage for long, and all of us old married folks know that. We have all had some HARD times, that's just marriage. This past year in my marriage has not been an easy one with my husband's transition out of the military in particular. And until I was photographing a lot of weddings, I knew it was fine, I knew it was normal. But weddings are the happiest day in a couple's life. They are SO happy, they are SO in love, they can't stop kissing and laughing and they are beaming with joy. Saturday after Saturday of hearing the most heartfelt vows, seeing all of the stolen kisses, all of the love and affection, you can start to think to yourself.... this isn't what my marriage looks like. This isn't what life looks like in my house. And then another wedding, the same joy, the same beautiful words to the other, and it's not your life. I have called friends after a wedding CRYING over the fact that my husband and I don't seem to have this elation, this joy anymore. Is something wrong? Shouldn't we be this happy?  Can I just watch happy couple after happy couple every weekend while struggling at home? The comparison was killing my own marriage. I was slowly convincing myself that since my life didn't look like that, my marriage was doomed.Here's the thing though. I am eight years into the day that I am witnessing every Saturday, and that's the most unfair comparison I can make. I was focusing so negatively on what my marriage didn't look like eight years later, I was comparing it to people's WEDDING days and that wasn't fair to my husband and I.If you are a wedding photographer who is struggling with watching couples so in love and so happy and feeling like something is wrong with you or your life, I'm writing this to tell you you aren't alone, but you have to stop. I am all in with my brides, and I won't even say just my brides, I have cried and hugged grooms and left feeling like they were my friends, too. I connect with my clients and I really do feel their joy on their day. But I think a lot of us have a tendency to compare that joy and it isn't fair. Think about the day you got married- you were just as happy! I was so excited to marry my husband. I can't compare a work day eight years into my marriage to another person's day of their wedding, its apples and oranges. And in 2023, when my wedding couples have been married for eight years, they have toddlers, they have work and life stress to juggle, I know their life isn't going to look like their wedding day. Just like our life doesn't look like our wedding day. That doesn't mean it isn't good, it just means its evolved.  We don't go out at night to dinners downtown at 9:00, we sit in bed with our separate phones. We argue about parenting all the time. We are never going to just randomly get caught slow dancing somewhere being cute, but we will borrow each other's reading glasses when someone's is lost. Love evolves, marriage evolves, and comparison is the thief of joy.So if anyone else is comparing your marriage to your wedding day couples, stop. Your couples deserve all the happiness in the world, which we all know, but YOU deserve it too. Don't discredit your marriage. We work in an environment where we are constantly around the happiest moments of people's lives, and we have to show up when things are good in our own life and bad.  So instead of feeling down and bringing in all the negativity of comparison into your own relationship, make being a wedding photographer a positive in your marriage!Ways this happens to me, is I can see the love between two people and instead of comparing in a negative way, I am reminded of the ways I love my husband. I think about how excited I felt to marry him, and I hope that my wedding couples still can't wait for their husbands to walk into the door from work like I do eight years after marrying mine. I love my husband, and I can either suck the happy out of my "seasoned" marriage comparing it unfairly to a wedding day, or I can look at a wedding day with a smile and say "I remember when", and know that all those feelings are still there.