18 Years Later
- Agnieszka Wolsoncroft
- Jul 5
- 7 min read
by Agnieszka Wolsoncroft
The morning of our wedding began with a fire.
Not metaphorically. An actual fire — at the hotel where David was staying with his family the night before our wedding. I was at the fresh fruit market at 7.30am, choosing strawberries and peaches for the reception, when my phone rang. David’s voice was calm, which should have told me everything. David is known — by everyone who loves him — to have a joke up his sleeve at any given moment. So when he said, “there’s been a fire at the hotel,” I thought it was exactly that.
It was not.
A small fire, contained quickly, with no one hurt. But there were his family from England and Australia standing outside in the July morning, some of the Polish hotel staff unable to communicate with them. They waited for the authorities to give the all-clear. My father and I arrived with a whole palette of fruit for the head chef — strawberries, peaches, grapes, apples, the colours of midsummer piled high. While he sorted the chaos of the morning, I slipped inside to check on the reception tables one last time: the flowers exactly as planned, and at every place setting a little koala and a hand-tied organza bag of local Polish chocolates — one small piece of Australia, one small piece of Poland, side by side. One from the groom, one from the bride. The decorated bridge was perfect. Everything was ready.
I was leaving the kitchen when the maitre d’ stopped me. “Miss Agnieszka,” he said, and gestured toward a large table in the corner. Standing on it was a chocolate fountain. “Do you think it is a good idea?”
I already had the whole picture in my mind: my godson, the other children, and quite a few dignified adults who would find themselves completely helpless in front of a strawberry or a wafer dipped in warm chocolate. I smiled. “The wedding hasn’t even started yet,” I told him, “and it already is brilliant.”
When I was sure everyone was alright and no more fire-danger around, I said “see you at church” to David and drove home.
I had a hair appointment in an hour and my bouquet still needed finishing.
This is what I know about that day: it started on fire, and it has never stopped burning.
The midsummer light in Poland in July is something else entirely. Long and golden and unhurried, like the day itself has decided not to end. My hair was curled up elaborately — my godson later told me it looked like a cauliflower, which I took as the highest of compliments. I made the bridal bouquet and the bridesmaids’ flowers myself, the way you do things when they matter to you.
The dress was mine, too — designed by me, not bought off a rail. I had gone to the salon and told the seamstress exactly what I wanted. She came back with fabric options and laid them out on the table; I moved them around, swapped, considered, until something clicked. The lace. The flower at the waist. The little diamonds catching light. When it was finished, I was proud of it in the way you are proud of something you have genuinely made. It felt, entirely, like me.
The church was beautiful. I stood there and prayed the simplest prayer I have ever prayed: “May we please be together forever.”
The reception was at Charlotta Valley — a venue on a lake, reached by a wooden bridge, built in what the English would call Tudor style, all dark timber and charm. We had chosen it together, David and I, and we had planned every detail: the menu designed with the head chef over months, the music with dedications for every family and friend, the little fisherman’s cottage on the water where the bride and groom could stay alone on their wedding night.
One hundred guests. Music that went until dawn. Then a few hours of sleep, and we started again at midday. The wedding lasted three days — the third evening, still a third of our guests were in my parents’ garden, talking and eating and laughing. David’s family had come from Australia and England. Mine had come from all over Poland. Somehow, despite every language barrier, everyone found each other.
My auntie said to me, years later: “I haven’t been to a better wedding yet. You were the nicest bride and groom to their guests. You literally thought of everything and everybody.”
I know she meant it. And I know why it was true: because we did think of everyone. That’s always been the point — not the day itself, but the people in it.
People talk about marriage like it’s a destination. You arrive on the wedding day and you’ve made it.
What nobody tells you is that the wedding day is just the beginning of choosing. And that choosing the same person, over and over again, through every version of yourselves you’re both going to become — that’s the real thing.
We met while working on a cruise ship and lived in London first. Then Australia, which for a girl from town in northern Poland felt like landing on another planet entirely — a beautiful, sunlit, impossibly wide planet with birds that laughed and skies that went on forever. We found a house we fell in love with. We adopted Leia from a shelter, and then a year later, Gizmo, also a rescue. We built something, slowly and deliberately, room by room and season by season.
There were health problems. Operations — mine, David’s. Job losses. Family and friends' deaths that took pieces of us, we’re still learning to live without. There were seasons that felt impossible, where getting through the day was the whole accomplishment.
There were years of undiagnosed endometriosis torture. Then years of fertility treatment, of hoping and losing hope and hoping again, of grief that had no language and no ceremony to mark it.
And then — in September 2024 — Anya.
Our daughter, six years old, from Thailand, with a smile that rearranges the furniture of your heart. She came into a family that had been shaped — slowly, sometimes painfully — into exactly the family she needed. Every hard season had been preparing us. Every loss had deepened our capacity. Every time we chose each other when it would have been easier not to — that was preparation, too.
The fire from day one has kept us for 18 years.
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I know that love is not a feeling that sustains itself. It’s a practice. It’s the phone call you make when you’re tired. The patience you find when you’re certain you have none left. The willingness to say “I got that wrong” before you go to sleep.
I know that the person who stands next to you at the altar is not the same person you will be standing next to in ten years, and that’s not a problem to be solved. It’s the whole point. You’re not marrying a fixed version of someone. You’re marrying someone you will have to keep discovering, season after season, as they grow and change and surprise you.
I know that the best thing David ever gave me was not the wedding, or the house, or even the life in Australia. It was the absolute certainty, through every difficult chapter, that he was still choosing this. Still here. Still in.
I know that my auntie was right: we thought of everything and everybody on our wedding day. And I believe that’s why it held. A marriage that begins in generosity tends to stay generous.
I know that 18 years is both a very long time and no time at all.
Thanksgiving. Appreciation. Gratitude.
Here is what 18 years has taught me about the TAG Method in love and partnership:
Thanksgiving (Action):
Showing up is the whole practice. Not on the good days only, but especially on the ones where showing up is the hardest thing you’ll do. The phone call when you’re depleted. The patience on the difficult morning. The decision to come back to the table. The choosing, again and again, even when choosing is costly. Love, in its most practical form, is an action word.
Appreciation (Awareness):
Notice what you have while you have it. Not in a fearful way — not as though everything is about to be taken from you — but in the way you look at something beautiful in the light and really let yourself see it. The person who knows how you take your tea. Who laughs at the same things. Who has seen you at your worst and chosen to stay. That is extraordinary. Don’t let it become ordinary through inattention.
Gratitude (Feeling):
Deep, real gratitude for the fire. For the difficult chapters that built you into people capable of the life you’re living now. For every season that tested you and found you still standing. For the person who stood at the altar next to you and meant it. For the family you chose and the family that chose you. For 18 years of an ordinary, extraordinary life.
When you practise all three together — showing up (Thanksgiving), paying attention (Appreciation), feeling genuinely grateful (Gratitude) — you stop waiting for love to be easier and start understanding that the work is the love.
Eighteen years ago, I stood on a bridge over a lake, in a dress I’d designed myself, with flowers I’d made with my own hands, and I prayed the simplest prayer: “May we please be together forever.”
Eighteen years later, I still mean it. More than ever.
With love and gratitude,
Agnieszka
If you’ve been thinking about what it means to really choose someone — again and again, through all the versions of yourselves you both become — the TAG Method is a gentle, practical place to begin. The 7-Day TAG Gratitude Reset is a beautiful companion for any season of love and commitment.
Come back in a fortnight. I’ll be here with a story about the things we almost give up on — the dreams we set down when life got heavy, the projects and hopes and quiet ambitions we told ourselves were probably foolish anyway. About what happens when you pick them back up. About why it’s never too late. I think you’ll want to read this one.
A New Chapter Begins
Next Sunday I'll be launching A Moment of TAG on Substack.
Every second Sunday I'll be sharing a reflection inspired by the TAG Method: Thanksgiving, Appreciation and Gratitude.
The first word we'll explore is Visibility.
I'd love you to join me.
Read more about gratitude and the TAG Method: GRATITUDE & THE TAG METHOD
If you'd like to read my previous posts, click here:
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