GIVE ME A SUMMER BREAK:After the honeymoon comes the hard work - I should know as someone who got engaged after a week and was married two months later, writes KATE HOLMQUIST
DEAR PEACHES (or should I say, Mrs Drummey), congratulations! You're married now and are probably feeling quite buzzed and ready to take on life with your new Harvard-educated rocker husband, Maxwell.
Your dad, Bob Geldof, did a good thing telling the world he was "happy" about your impromptu wedding at the Little White Chapel in Vegas and I hope he actually is. But what are you doing back in London already? Leaving Maxwell behind with his band - which I'd never heard of - Chester French is it? I really hope it wasn't a publicity stunt because, personally, I don't have a problem with you marrying him after going out for a month (a period of time in which you were believed to be with someone else).
I did the same thing - and I was older than you are - in my 20s as opposed to sweet 19 (and I was with someone else, too). I got engaged after a week and was married at the first possible opportunity (two months later), although if we could have, we'd have flown to Vegas on our second date.
That's what true love does. It makes you kind of crazy.When you meet your soul-mate - the only person in the world for you - impulsive people like you and me want to make it a solid real thing so that all the world knows that you two won't be torn apart.
Peaches, 24 years later I'm still married. And truly I hope that 24 years from now you are too. Expect a few twists and turns on the tracks, though. It's not going to turn out like you've hoped or expected.
Your dreamy knight in shining armour will be frazzled and tarnished before you know it and all the things that you two share in common, things that seem so important now, will fade into the background as the practical problems of life emerge to test you both.
It's going to be so, so hard when you stop living the dream of being in love and start living the reality. You'll learn that love isn't what you feel, it's what you do and at times you might even imagine that running away will be easier, like your mum Paula did.
But you're not your mother, Peaches. Just remember that. Your destiny is your own. And while right now it may seem that Maxwell is a person with whom you can be totally and utterly "yourself", you actually stopped being yourself when you got married.
You're two people now, so you are going to have to change to make your marriage last, as will he. You're going to have to learn to compromise and give up pieces of what you want, just as he will. Just remember that giving up what you want doesn't mean having to give up asking for what you need.
Do realise though, that all your needs aren't going to be met by this marriage. You're going to need other people in your life too, and so will he because you have a lot of interests individually that you can't share together.
The simplest things can cause rows when newly-weds can't see this. I was on the train the other day sitting across from a newly-wed couple. She was on her way home from work, new rings glittering on her finger and sitting on her own reading a romance novel. Then her groom joined her on the train - obviously having made an effort to meet her at a particular stop in a particular carriage (quite romantic, really).
After a delighted-to-see you kiss, he started reading the Financial Times, just as he always does on the train going home from work, I imagine. She engaged him in conversation of the "how was your day variety" and he gave an unintelligible answer, which one might interpret as gruff, even though it was quite clear he was delighted to be sitting beside her.
Then she tried interesting him in the fact that the white suit she was wearing needed dry cleaning. He didn't respond. Then he pointed to an article that described how a particular stock, in which he had apparently invested, had fallen by 30 points.
Her response was, "Don't worry. It was even lower before." He rustled his paper and withdrew a little. From his body language and his mumbling it was clear that he thought she didn't appreciate the enormity of the falling stock price.
So then they stopped talking and sat, her with her romance novel and he with his Financial Times, in their separate worlds, waiting for their stop so that they could go home and play at being happy newly-weds, even though he didn't seem to care enough about her dry cleaning and she didn't seem to care enough about his investments.
That's marriage, Peaches. People with agendas - a few of them shared, if you've made a good choice - who gradually have to learn to understand what's important to one another. It has very little to do with love and more to do with patience and empathy.
I hope that Maxwell is as patient and empathetic as my husband, who I agreed to marry after a week. And I hope you're as patient as me (considering that my husband will once again forget our anniversary at the end of the month as he always does), so that you understand that true love infatuation is just the departure lounge and you've got quite a lot of travelling to do before you arrive anywhere near the stop you're hoping to arrive at. But it's worth it.