Wedding Plans?

46 weeks left
3 pounds lost (15 total)
16(ish) months until the wedding

Have you ever noticed that when you’re sick on the couch you’re far more willing to watch crap tv than at other times? This is how I found myself tonight. With nothing spectacular on the television, I sat looking through the TV Guide channel, blowing my nose endlessly and sucking on cough drops like my life depended on them. (Allergies, oh allergies. Why must you plague me? It’s spring; it’s winter; it’s summer. Come on now- please pick a season. I have the windows open and then have to run the heat in the same day. I clean my house one minute and the very next time I open my windows, I have a new layer of disgusting green pollen on all the furniture. Yeah. Let’s just have it be summer already, please? I’m dying here.)

So, because I’m sick and willing to watch crap tv, and because there seems to be nothing else on tonight and because someone asked me last week to talk about my wedding plans, (and I had absolutely nothing to contribute to that particular conversation) I thought that I might turn my attention this evening to the channel whose entire Friday night programming centers on shows about buying wedding dresses and judging other people’s weddings.

Oh. Dear. Lord.

Now, when you go back through the blogs I’ve written so far that have something to do with wedding detail planning, you will notice that I have the following wedding-planning constraints: (Constraints? Details? Potato, Pa-TAT-o?)

1) J and I are paying for this ourselves, so we’re not trying to break the bank.

2) I am anti-bridey in terms of fanciness, tulle, fluffiness, etc.

3) I hate shoes (this is ok because mom-in-law has already purchased me adorable wedding flip flops!)

4) I’m pretty independent (I don’t need to 16 people to tell me what I’m doing is ok.)

5) I’m not super girlie (but definitely have “the dress” pretty much picked out…and imagine…I did that all by myself!)

6) I’m perfectly willing to write a check and have someone else do everything for me (not a big check mind you, but especially since we’re getting married somewhere far from where I currently live, all-inclusives are HIGH on our list.)

7) In combination with above, I believe I have also mentioned that I don’t really like shopping so much.

8) I’m not great with minutiae (well, I AM great with minutiae, I just don’t like having to be the one to do it.)

9) J is a bit of a foodie and cares about the food. A lot. (I’d eat pizza, though discovered this evening that that is a wedding faux pas. My bad.)

10) Our friends are all partiers, and therefore we will have good booze at an open bar, served at the actual hotel where we’re all staying so that no one even has the opportunity to think about driving.

And….yeah, that’s about it. All our friends. Good booze. Great food. And safe and comfortable accommodations for our guests. That’s really about all. Oh, yes. And we should get married sometime in that day somewhere. That’d be good, too. The marriage part of the wedding.

So, I’m sitting here watching people bring their entire hometown with them to these high end stores to try on $11,000 dresses (are you kidding me? Do you know what I could do with $11k?) and I’m watching brides get talked out of dresses that they love because their mailman that they decided to bring along with them that day thinks there should be more “poof”. I’m watching people mortgage their houses to pay for parts of this day because there is NO WAY the day will be successful unless there is a magician at the reception (whatever happened to YMCA being the pinnacle of the evening? By the way, J has preemptively outlawed the “typical wedding song” list which includes but is not limited to: YMCA, the chicken dance, the hokey pokey, and Celebration by Kool and the Gang. I hope you all enjoy dancing to Linkin Park…)

So here I sit, watching people cry because they aren’t being included in the wedding process (people, like second cousins by marriage once removed who have never even met the bride before). I see Fathers taking out loans to let their little girls bedazzle things with real crystals (because clearly it won’t look cheap and bedazzled if it’s *real*). I don’t want to seem unromantic. And I guess it’s totally their prerogative. It is their wedding, and to each their own, I guess. And I don’t want to seem anti-wedding. Because I’m really excited about my wedding. I really am. But are you kidding me? When did weddings become all about that stuff? Isn’t a wedding just a celebration that begins what really matters…the marriage? Do people really sell their souls for ONE over-the-top day?I just don’t understand this mindset. And I sorta wish I did, because then maybe I’d be kicked into wedding-planning hyper drive like I feel like I should be.

Now if you thought the “buying the dress” show seemed a little intense, the wedding competition show was even worse! ("Wedding" and "competition" should not be in the same sentence in my humble opinion.) If you don’t know about it, here’s the premise: Four brides throw the weddings of their dreams and invite the other three (complete strangers) to come to said wedding and critique it…and score it…and then the person with the highest score gets a free honeymoon. Can we say catty, horrible, competitive, mean women?! Imagine on the greatest day of your life, you have three virtual strangers talking trash about how you decorated and about how “plain and simple” you as a bride looked (you know, on the one day of your life when you actually are supposed to really really care about how you look.) Unbelievable was this concept to me (and yet, like a train wreck, I could not turn it off. It was like 5 hours of wedding porn.) And even worse, the people that won were always the people that spent the most money. Yuck. (And I mean, if you’re willing and able to spend $150k on a wedding, let’s be honest. You probably don’t *need* a free honeymoon.)

So, basically what watching these shows this evening did for me was this:

1) Make me ever-so-slightly anxious about the fact that I literally have nothing done yet for the wedding.

2) Make want to weeeeeeen the guest list down to like six people that I know won’t judge my entrée for being too “ordinary” and my flowers for being “typical.”

3) Make me entertain further the idea of eloping (by the way, this is just talk. I would never ever do this to my family or J’s family, and I actually wouldn’t be happy doing this either. But a girl can fantasize what it might be like, right?)

4) Make me appreciate my family and J’s family because I know that those people on tv are *not* them. Thank goodness. (seriously, I love you all even more now.)

5) Make me want to remember that it’s not about money, and that the marriage and the people we love should be at the forefront of this day. And that is all.

6) Remind me that I should warn you all in advance (lest you be horribly disappointed upon arrival) that we will not be having a carousel or fire-breathers at the wedding. I apologize.

7) Make me realize that next Friday night, when I’m all alone on the couch, surfing for things to watch on tv, I should definitely find something else to occupy my time. Sick or not, no good can come from this.