Here’s what they don’t tell you about planning a wedding:
It’s kind of fucking hard?
We all know the bridezilla trope: the screaming, crying, scream-crying bride in the middle of a literal meltdown about, like, the ribbons around silverware not being tied correctly.
Ryan and I have watched, and LOL-ed at, many a season of “Bridezillas.” And while, yes, there is certainly a level of White Trash Drama and filter of Reality TV on top of it, now that I am actually living this pseudo-nightmare, I’m kind of like … can we cut a bride a break? MAYBE the ribbons should be tied correctly because she PROBABLY told a bitch how to do it 14 fucking times and it was still wrong and there are 10383458956984 other things to do and you couldn’t even do that WTF BECKY???
Let me clarify: I am very excited to marry my fiancé. I have known that I wanted to marry him since a particular moment about six months into our “official” boyfriend/girlfriend status that I will not spoil here, because some other time I’ll write a more sentimental post about it. But imagine that scene in “The Office” before it sucked, where Jim and Pam* are like, “When did you know?” and know that I knew.
Anyway.
We had been talking about this adult thing called marriage for a long time, and in much more detail the last year or so leading up to our engagement. I may not have known when he would propose (toss-up between a California trip to celebrate our six-year anniversary, or my birthday during the holidays (hollydays)), but I knew it would happen.
And that is … all the thought I’d ever put to a wedding.
Really.
I didn’t have a Pinterest account until I had a pear-shaped diamond ring.** I had never thought about colors. About table settings. I had never thought about literally where we would even have the thing.
I figured, “Columbus,” because my family is from (very generously and generally speaking) the Cincinnati area and his is from Cleveland. Our friends are scattered about, but Ohio is a home base for many.
I figured, “Juliette, whose fault it is that we are even together in the first place, really, will make a speech.”
I figured, “I will probably not wear heels.”
I figured, “I hate sweating, so it won’t be in May, June, July, August or even September.”***
I figured, “There will be tequila.”
And that was it. I never dreamed about the dress. I don’t even like cake. You can only get me within 25 actual feet of a “dance floor” situation if it is 1) high school homecoming in 2005 or 2) after at least 3 tequila shots.
I have always really hated the stereotype that “all” little girls grow up dReAmInG aBoUt ThEiR wEdDiNg.
I don’t know. I mean, I think some of them dream about seeing their books smushed between Meg Cabot and Michael Crichton on a bookshelf at Barnes & Noble, but, okay, let’s center a girl’s ambition and future around how heterosexual relationships and patriarchal systems are “the norm.”
I’ve got girl friends who know exactly what their wedding will look like, and I’m not trying to shame them or anyone who is excited to have one. And I get that some women really want to be wives, like that is their life goal (?) and, shit. Girl, do your thing. My issue isn’t with that, it’s with the idea that it’s all a woman should ever want, or that a woman should ever feel like “becoming a wife” and “throwing a wedding” is one of the most important things she’ll ever do.
Not for me.
I have a supportive, loving partner who I know for a fact would be totally down if I was like, “Fuck it, let’s go to Athens and sign a paper and do 8 hot nut shots each at Tony’s,” and who would have been totally shocked if I had revealed that, after crying happy tears into my second glass of Vanderpump rosé at Lisa Vanderpump’s LA landmark Sexy Unique Restaurant where we got engaged, I had a wedding plan mapped out in my head on a scale anywhere near the career ladder plan I have mapped out in my head.
And that’s why we’re getting married.
To me, when I hear “wedding,” I hear, “party.”
I’m not religious, and neither is he, so none of that shit. Keep your Jesus out of our Jell-O shots. And as extroverted as my expletives and sarcasm might come off on the internet, I am actually a big-ass introvert who does NOT do well in situations where literally all eyes are on me. Funny that I am marrying a person who is like, same, even though he is in a band and has been comfortable in front of crowds forever.
So, no, we won’t be doing the “first look” bullshit or the “wrap your arms around me and look up to the sky” (at Jesus?) photo moment. Or, honestly, the first dance. That’s right. It’s 2021 by the time we get to have a wedding and we will not be “slow” “dancing” to some dumbass country song.
Even with a lot of the conventional things deemed as bullshit, the process of starting to plan a wedding?
That’s the part that’s fucking hard.
I immediately struggled with all of the information I apparently needed to download into my brain after 29 years of actively avoiding learning information about wedding planning.
It is so stressful? I’m a list-maker, a life planner. I am organized. I like to be in control. I am a Sagittarius, Capricorn moon. So you’d think that planning a huge party would be up my alley. But JESUS. We have at least 7 work-in-progress Google Sheets and that was before, well… we’ll get there.
But, like, why the fuck do I have to give my bridesmaids gifts a thousand times? I adore them, to be fair, but??? Why does each of the 125 guests need a tiny table succulent to not take home? Why does there have to be so much music specifically planned? Why the hell do we have to tell you where to crash afterward, Google Maps has existed since forever, figure it out? Do we need a videographer? Everyone says we do, but the price seems stupid when I really hate seeing myself on video and we will probably have microchips in our brains in 50 years when we’d want to watch it anyway?
And the timelines. The timelines.
My first mistake was thinking I could get a Fall 2020 wedding when I got engaged in Fall 2019.
Married women looked me in the eye, tossed their heads back and hollered.
Hahahahahahahaha.
HAHAHAHA.
Not really, but the sounds they did make made me think they were definitely just trying not to make loud, obnoxious noises in public spaces, but, omg this poor innocent dumb doomed soul.
In my defense, no one tells you that! Or at least, no one told me that because they knew I probably wasn’t a dream-wedding-planning person so why would we ever talk about the first step in planning a wedding, which is booking your venue approximately 18 years out?
And wedding dress shopping nine months out? People have full-ass babies in that time! ALL I have to do is say “yes,” and “how do you ship it to me?” That can’t take that long! I want to make reservations for margaritas afterward, hurry it up!
This leads me to the other thing they don’t tell you about planning a wedding:
It’s expensive as fuck.
Like, we all know, right? BUT WHY DON’T WE TALK ABOUT THIS. Why the actual hell do we spend tens of thousands of dollars on 6 hours of your lifetime? Looking at venue estimates like, “What.” Looking at catering estimates for salad bars like, “HAHAHA, what.” Looking at photographers who slap a VSCO filter over their shit apparently, asking for $3K like, “I’m sorry …. WHAT.”
I am a privileged millennial woman who is currently digging herself out of student loan debt, making almost what she should be paid as an annual salary**** and generally doing okay for herself. I even consider myself above average in the savings department, because I can be frugal, just not when it’s sweaters season or when I’m dreaming about Airbnbs in Los Angeles.
But still, um, what? You want me to spend 80% of my life’s savings, while still in major debt, renting a house, etc., SO YOU CAN WATCH ME DO THINGS LIKE THROW A BOUQUET OF FLOWERS THAT COST $100 RANDOMLY AT A FEMALE ACQUAINTANCE’S HEAD?
Whatthefuck????????
Coming to the realization of what this party of marriage was going to cost us was, um, shocking. How do people do it? How do 22-year olds from my high school do it? (At church, for probably free, lol.) How do all of these young millennials do it? (With their parents’ money.) HOW DOES ANYONE DO IT. (By not talking about it because if they did they would burst into swift and endless tears.)
We’re cutting corners where we can, and luckily, because we are two people in a healthy, long-term relationship, we aren’t the couple that’s like, “LOL well the BRIDE wants LOTSA FLOWERS haha YOU KNOW CRAZY WOMEN.”
Because, 1) fuck that shitty stereotype, too. This party is a partnership. And 2) yes, I do want lotsa flowers, but I told Ryan that would be My Thing, and I would splurge on it myself.
Bo$$ bride.
But, wow. Even after choosing a place that includes a great aesthetic, good timeframe, reasonable price for the space and the alcohol consumption that will happen; after keeping the guest list REAL tight to just people we actually like*****; after my artist sister****** offered to design our invites and signage things; after I set the dress budget to “BHLDN”; after we cut the tiny grilled cheeses off the catering plan……..it is still going to be such a thing.
Such a thing.
I feel like you’re probably like, then shut up and just don’t … have a wedding? You can fucking elope?
And, lol, I know, right?
But, also—shouldn’t we all be allowed to want to have a wedding even though it’s rooted in outdated assumptions and too. goddamn. expensive. and otherwise panic attack inducing?
There are parts of me that truly, truly want a wedding. And as stupid stressful as it had become, I started to come around to understanding the hype.
I want to say yes to being surrounded by guests of our choice; by my “bridesmaids,” who are really just my sisters and my sisters from other misters in an array of velvet and satin dresses; by literal endless glasses of wine and whiskey until we hit the bar limit; by flower arrangements that might cost the same amount as a down payment on a sedan. I want say yes to throwing a party with my partner, to celebrating us, because we fucking can. (Probably. We opened a joint savings account, so that’s a good first step.)
Which brings me to the last thing no one tells you about planning a wedding:
GLOBAL PANDEMICS CAN HAPPEN AT ANY TIME BUT ESPECIALLY RIGHT AS YOU ARE PLANNING A WEDDING.
Our original date was a Friday in February. I was deep in the aforementioned stress by the time Miss Corona made herself known. Luckily, we just avoided being truly fucked. We had picked a date, and tentatively held it at the venue. But, again, a FRIDAY in FEBRUARY didn’t seem like the hottest ticket (my best friend who lives in Seattle was like, “I will come out a week early just in case” after it fully snowstormed on that date this year), so we weren’t worried about needing to eventually make the deposit. We had asked our friends to be in our respective parties at this big-ass party. We had made the guest list, a tentative I-guess-we-have-to photographer list. I knew who I wanted to reach out to about flowers, duh.
And then, the week before we were supposed to have our siblings and parents in town to meet for the first time (!), shit hit the fan.
I’ve now been working remotely since the middle of March. A couple of weeks into this new hellscape, I mean, normal, Ryan was laid off.
The gut feeling was immediate. We had to postpone. We hadn’t even started the real work of it yet, but I could no longer fathom flying to DC to dress shop in two months. I could not imagine us handing over too many freaking dollars to a photographer, a DJ, even a florist at this moment, knowing that neither of us were super comfortable with the bare minimum this thing was going to cost, anyway.
We decided to push our wedding out before a lot of people realized how long this shit was going last, before we even realized it. We just knew it felt like the right thing to do. So, we snagged a Fall 2021 date (sorry, process-ignorant brides who get engaged in Fall 2020!) before all the Summer and Fall 2020 brides had to start pushing their weddings out.
And now, after being like, “THIS IS SO OVERWHELMING” and then, “THIS IS SO EXPENSIVE,” we’re trapped in this engaged couples’ purgatory of “THIS IS????????”
And it is not even an island purgatory, like on “Lost.” (SPOILER.)
Our new timeline starts up soon. Ryan’s like, “We have 14 months to plan.” But I’m that math meme with numbers and checks and credit card applications swirling around my head. It has already been almost six months since we decided to push our wedding out eight months. SIX MONTHS.
WHAT IS TIME.
And there’s even more to consider now than before. Do we feel comfortable with this new date, knowing what we know now about that motherfucker COVID-19? I don’t want a wedding where people can deny doing shots with me because they have to wear a mask. I don’t want to spend a small fortune I could leave to my cats on a party where everyone has to sit in their seats.
That doesn’t seem worth it to me. Literally.
Will I be able to see my five bridesmaids in March, to wedding dress shop and then bar hop? Is it crazy to try and plan a bachelorette party for next August? I like, don’t even know?
MAYBE IF I WAS RELIGIOUS SOMEONE WOULD GIVE ME A SIGN.
Reality check moment: I know I’m not the only bride-to-be riding first class on the hot mess express. I really do feel so bad for the couples who had invested so much more — LITERALLY — than us when this shit really hit. I can’t imagine the heartbreak and the headache of this thing wholly, fully, entirely fucking up your wedding.
I hope every single one of them added “champagne fountain” to the catering expense.
I dusted off the ol’ Google Sheets yesterday, which inspired this post. I felt immediately overwhelmed, lol, again, but also… hopeful, ugh.
I have a vision, by which I mean I have a couple of STACKED Pinterest boards. I have eight dresses bookmarked on BHLDN dot com. I have been diligently stalking my favorite local florists to make sure they survive this pandemic. I have a ~ girl gang ~ ready to rally in six months or six more after that.
And, most importantly, I have a fiancé who’s ready to stand by my side through better (like when we actually throw this thing) or worse (wait, there’s…worse?) — and who’s ready to just go to Athens and sign a paper and do eight hot nut shots each at Tony’s.
You know, as the backup to the backup plan.
*Ugh, fucking Pam.
**I had to RESEARCH DIAMOND SHAPES no fewer than like, two years ago. I didn’t even know what they were or which one I liked the most.
***Or outside, fuck those bugz.
****¯\_(ツ)_/¯
*****We come from small-ish family circles with no real desire to pity invite the dysfunctional ones, and we’re really particular about our friends and hardly make new ones. I mean, can you imagine being a person who knows 300 people, let alone wants to spend $50 a plate on them???
****** @emco.creates <333
hi, i’m holly. 