When I said 'I do', I knew I was settling. Twenty years on, here's the unvarnished truth about marrying Mr OK rather than Mr Right By Tess Stimson Published: 01:47, 20 September 2024 | Updated: 01:47, 20 September 2024 e-mail View comments Exchanging vows with my handsome groom on a beach in Hawaii as the sun set behind us, I knew I looked the very picture of the happy bride. In my £2,000 pearl-encrusted wedding dress, my hair caught up in my mother’s family tiara, I’d never felt more beautiful.
Total strangers at our £1,400-per-night resort were caught up in the romance of it all, throwing leis — Hawaiian garlands of flowers — at our feet. No one watching could have supposed we were anything other than madly in love. But the truth was, as fond as I was of Erik, my gorgeous new husband, he didn’t set my world alight.
Tess with her husband Erik, whom she met in 2001 at a friend's wedding in Florida. 'I was 34, I’d been divorced two years, and was still nursing a heart broken twice over,' she writes Erik and Tess married in Hawaii, with just a priestess as a witness. 'In my £2,000 pearl-encrusted dress, my hair caught up in my mother’s family tiara, I’d never felt more beautiful' There were no butterflies in my stomach at the thought of marrying him, and I didn’t feel a tingle of excitement when he entered a room.
He wasn’t my Prince Charming, but Mr Safe-and-Secure. Which is why, when I read the recent confession in this paper of a woman who’d settle.