Advice

Feb 2012

How I Came To Grips With My Giant Guest List

I'm so sick of people telling you that the way to have an affordable wedding is to cut down your guest list. I'm actually SO sick of it that I wrote a book to disprove the point. Because if you ask me, Miss Manners was right all along (of course). You figure out the number of people you love who need to be at your wedding, and then you figure out what you can afford to serve them... never the other way around. I'm tired of wedding vendors telling you to cut your guest list to afford their services. I'm tired of people acting like only tiny weddings are cool weddings. I'm tired of people saying that if you want to have an intimate and emotional experience, you can only have a small number of people at your wedding. Because you know what? You should have as many people that you love as you can possibly fit at your wedding. So I'm super thrilled to have Jesse here today, walking you through the nitty gritty of a giant guest list. Guest lists may never get easy, but this will help. (And besides, girlfriend gave up planning her wedding for Lent. That shit is hilarious. We love her.)

If it comes to a choice between X wedding expense, and inviting more people, we invite more people.

Wedding rule number one for Warwick’s and my wedding.

It was decided in one of the first conversations we had about what our wedding should be. Rule number two is “If it doesn’t sound like fun we don’t do it,” which is also a good rule, but this post is about coming to terms with rule number one.

I thought the people first rule was great. I have a huge family, (eighteen first cousins, most of them married at this point, fifteen aunts and uncles, and none that I don’t see regularly and get along with), we have a ton of friends (high school, a super close-knit college family, and every theatre either of us has worked at in the last five years), and a sizable number of family friends. All of these people are special, fabulous, and fun.

About a month after getting engaged I decided to start some solid concrete planning. Step one was to find a venue, and in order to do that I needed a rough guesstimate of the number of guests. I entered in everyone I initially thought of on a spreadsheet (along with how we knew them, and where they were located, since I’m type A like that). I had Warwick add his list, then his mom, then my parents. Finally I went back through and added “and guest” to each person on the list whose significant other wasn’t already included. At the end, I looked at my list and had a panic attack.

374 people.

And this was after I had already talked my mom out of inviting all of her cousins, my great aunts and uncles, and several of her friends who I don’t know as well.

I shut down. This all happened in early Febuary. I announced to Warwick, my family, and my bridesmaids that I was giving up the wedding for Lent. I would not answer any questions about it, I would not be reading any wedding blogs and I would not be dealing with this list. Maybe a slight overreaction, but as it turns out a pretty good one. It gave me a chance and back up and get some perspective.

Forty days later, I reapproached everything with a clearer head. I’m smart, I’m good at making things, I don’t need all the bells and whistles, not all of those people would be able to come; this would be fine. I told everyone involved that none of us were allowed to make any more friends for the next year, and Warwick and I started on a mission to start hooking up friends so that they would be each other’s dates and we could cut some of those “and guest”s. Those last two are mostly meant jokingingly, though not entirely.

Continue reading How I Came To Grips With My Giant Guest List

Posted in: Planning, Planning, Wedding Undergraduates | 126 Comments »

Jan 2012

Why My Queer Marriage Needed a Wedding (Even Though We’re Courthouse People)

One of the questions I've been asked with some regularity on the book tour is a variation of the question, "Why weddings?" or "Why marriages?" There actually are layers upon layers of questions here: Why do we view marriages (and worse, engagements) as more culturally valid than anything else? And "Why a wedding?" can mean "Why a party?" or "Why the cultural monstrosity manipulatively pushed on us by the wedding industry?" When asked, I always answer that there are different reasons for everyone, and at APW we're just trying to explore those answers. So I'm particularly pleased by the answer in today's post from Laurel. Let's dive in.

At one point, during the eight months my partner and I spent talking about whether we were going to have a wedding—after the even longer process of deciding that we were in it for the long haul and might consider getting married at all—she said, “But we’re courthouse people.” It’s true. We come from a long line of courthouse people. There were six people at her parents’ wedding, a number which includes the two of them and which is one fewer than at my parents’ only because they successfully kept their own parents from attending. (My dad’s parents crashed their wedding from 1500 miles away with a suitcase full of lobster bisque and sachertorte, but that’s another story for another day.) When my aunt decided to get married, she called me on a Monday and asked if I’d drive up to Reno with her on Wednesday and witness her marriage. (In the end she got married at the Oakland courthouse; there were eight people there, making it the second largest wedding in either of our immediate families.) In our unique, and somehow shared, family culture, it made perfect sense for my mother to ask if she was invited to our wedding.

So yes, we're courthouse people. We decided we wanted the socially and culturally privileged position of marriage; even in our queerish ultra-progressive semi-radical cultural niche, people treat marriages and partnerships differently.* We saw friends get married and the way their families and complete strangers immediately understood that their relationships were now Important and Meaningful. We saw the huge outpouring of love and support our friends got when they decided to get married. It certainly makes a difference in how our families understand our relationship. There’s just one wrinkle: we’re both women.

We considered getting married in Iowa, where my parents live, but it felt unsatisfying. We’d be asking people to treat our relationship differently because we signed a piece of paper that had no legal effect where we lived. Even with a license, all it takes is one car accident in a conservative town and a nurse with something to prove, and I won’t be able to see her in the hospital. If we have kids and one of us stays home, we can’t contribute to that person’s retirement funds or personal savings without worrying about whether we’d need to pay gift tax. The license doesn’t change that.

Plus, I’ve spent a lot of time arguing that it’s not the license that makes the marriage. I believe it. Why, for my own marriage, would I make all my decisions around the license?

Continue reading Why My Queer Marriage Needed a Wedding (Even Though We’re Courthouse People)

Posted in: LGBTQ Weddings, Wedding Undergraduates | 30 Comments »

Jan 2012

How a Lot of Talking and a Little Perspective Slew the Pre-engagement Beast

The thing about weddings (and engagements, and hell, marriage) is that our cultural narrative about them is so strong that even those of us used to bucking the trend and doing things our own way can get pulled down into its vortex. Stacey's post about waiting for her partner to propose is powerful because she talks about untangling that cultural narrative, freeing herself from it, and then figuring out what's right for them both. Sometimes I think that learning how to do this during the engagement and wedding planning process is half the point of a wedding... because we need to do it over and over again as we build our families and our marriages.

Dear Team Practical members, who like me, are patiently (or not so patiently) waiting on a ring, or an engagement puppy, or for some ducks to line the heck up, I have some news for you!

Last weekend, my wonderful-beyond-measure boyfriend mentioned on a lazy Saturday morning that he’d been thinking about engagement rings. Now, before you get all "omgamazeballsdiamonds" let me say that this isn’t the first time this has happened.

The conversation went like this:

Him: I was thinking about engagement rings.
Me: (With forced nonchalance) What about them?
Him: What kind of ring you’d like, I guess.
Me: Well, I can find some examples of things I like, if you want.*
Him: Okay, sure.

*No, I didn’t have a secret file of engagement ring pictures on my computer somewhere.

Now. This exchange is remarkable for two reasons. Reason one: when the subject of engagement rings was first ever broached between us, he made it very clear that this was his thing, and that under no circumstances did he want my input, or for me to mention that this was a thing that was actually, maybe, happening at some point. That was six months ago.

But I, I, probably like many of you Practical People, am a do-er. If I want something to happen, I make it happen; if I don’t like how something in my life is going, or I’m unhappy, I think about what’s actually not working, and I change it. I’m that girl who in middle school, and high school, and… college rolled her eyes and sighed heavily at her group project members and then made all the pie charts and Powerpoints on her own. I would rather do all the work myself and secure a positive outcome than leave anything up to my team members and thus, chance.

So, when my boyfriend told me to stay out of his engagement tree house, I freaked out. I called my mom frantically because "I only wear one pair of earrings, and one necklace! HOW IS HE SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT I WANT IN A RING?" but really I was frantic because I couldn’t relinquish that control. So, for several months I quietly freaked out. Reading APW helped. A lot. But still those romantic comedy clichés and societal expectations were hard to weed out of my mind—they set down roots ages ago, and those roots have grown deep and strong.

Continue reading How a Lot of Talking and a Little Perspective Slew the Pre-engagement Beast

Posted in: Engagements & Proposals, Wedding Undergraduates | 55 Comments »

Jan 2012

Sweet Moments During Deployments: Planning a Wedding Over Skype

Last week, we had several conversations about making and owning our life choices. Lauren talked about grappling with her choice not to have children. Clare talked about choosing to take in their tiny nieces in their first year of marriage. I talked about choosing to work for myself. So we thought that this week we'd talk about the things you can't plan for... how wedding planning and marriage can make you come face-to-face with the fact that you're not actually in charge. We're starting with a lovely post about wedding planning during a deployment; it is both deeply personal and truly universal.

Deployed fiance overseas skype wedding planning

I want you to try to read the following without laughing out loud: my life is very stressful right now, and to try to relieve stress, I have started planning a wedding.

I’m guessing that, at the very least, your eyebrows went up.

After all, part of the reason we’re all here on APW is that we’ve found that wedding planning is not the simple experience we thought it would be, and that even though we’re all very strong-minded individuals, we wanted some affirmation that we are not crazy for not wanting to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a single day. Subverting the expectations is stressful. Planning a wedding, under the best of circumstances, is stressful. Nonetheless, the wedding planning is my stress release.

Let me explain. A year and a half ago, I would have told you that I expected to be single (or, at least, not find The One) until I was into my thirties. That was how it worked for my parents and for many of the people with whom they associated when I was little. My mother gave me books like A Wrinkle In Time, Alanna, Dealing with Dragons—the heroine went off and saved the world, and weddings rarely figured in. I had not planned my wedding out, and to be frank, the idea of settling down with someone was something I wanted in a very abstract way.

I’ll spare you the story of how my fiancé and I met, save to say that it was akin to being struck by lightning (or, as we both put it later, like being smacked across the face by an emotional 2x4). It was charmed, it was romantic, it was heady and sickeningly cute: from the night we worked up the courage to tell each other how we felt, we did not spend a night apart—until he deployed.

Yes, about eight months after we started dating, his deployment began. During the training, before he shipped out of the country, we talked about eloping on his four-day pass, maybe flying my parents out so we could all be together, then doing an engagement (and ceremony and reception) when he got back.

We decided not to do that, but since then we’ve been quasi-engaged, and a lack of a bended-knee proposal and an engagement ring hasn’t stopped us from discussing houses, gardens, travel, child care, careers, and wedding planning, all conversations which have happened over Skype, either at 5AM my time (oh, godddd) or 5AM his time (likewise).

I would spare you the details of the deployment, but I’m not sure I should. Deployment is happening all around you; it is affecting thousands of families. Continue reading Sweet Moments During Deployments: Planning a Wedding Over Skype

Posted in: The Hard Stuff, Wedding Undergraduates | 87 Comments »

Jan 2012

Wedding Graduates Return: Nicole

We're starting the year with posts on marriage from readers who started reading APW when I started writing it, and who have been growing right along side me and the site. Nicole was part of the first week of wedding graduates (back when it was an every-now-and-then kind of project), and she wrote about how her wedding was still crazy joyful, even with a wrecked wedding cake. Now she's back, with her adorable baby girl, talking about how the lessons she learned in wedding planning have continued to matter every day of their marriage. So for all of you newly engaged ladies: What you're doing right now is valuable and important. Cheers!

Now that I’m a mom (What? That still feels weird to say), I read a lot about parenting. I take a research approach: learning about the different ideas out there, gleaning a few things here and there that work for us, filing away little things that might be helpful now or later. You know, I try to be practical about the whole thing.

One of the parenting philosophies that has resonated with me has to do with creating a secure base for a child. The theory goes that if you create a nurturing, loving, secure home base for your child, he or she will be more free to explore and spread his/her wings as a confident independent little person, knowing they can always return to you for security and reassurance when needed.

The idea applies to marriages as much as it does to babies. It wasn’t intentional, but that’s exactly what Patrick and I have created for ourselves—a home base of support.

In the three years since our wedding day, we’ve moved back to our hometown, finished a degree, lost jobs, gotten new jobs, bought a house, had unexpected cuts in income, marked two 30th birthdays, celebrated joys, lost loved ones, and welcomed a daughter into our family. Planning a wedding taught us a lot about how we approach decisions big and small, and we use those lessons all the time. Those months of making lists, talking to vendors and deciding what was important to us taught us about when to rely on our guts, when to run the numbers, when to splurge, when to be thrifty, and when to talk it out.

Continue reading Wedding Graduates Return: Nicole

Posted in: Wedding Graduates Return | 16 Comments »

Jan 2012

Wedding Graduates Return: Marchelle & Three Years of Joy

How to start a new year, here at APW? How to start 2012 with many of you (if all is as it ever is) newly engaged after a season of lights? I thought we'd start with a post from my dear friend Marchelle, who is celebrating the third anniversary of her wedding exactly today. Her post is about why her wedding day mattered. Hopefully it will give those of you just starting down the path of wedding planning an understanding of why you're doing it. As a no-longer newlywed, it gave me a sharp reminder of why my marriage matters. As Marchelle so eloquently says in this post, "Begin as you mean to go on." And so we shall, on this first day of APW for 2012. So we shall.

I write this post from deep in the middle of the hardest time we have so far been through in our marriage. That may seem an odd time to choose to reflect on how our wedding might have shaped our marriage, and an unlikely position from which to reassure those newly considering the prospect of tying their lives together, but hear me out, because it’s not. I have never been more grateful for our marriage, and by extension, our wedding, than in the last year, so the timing feels ideal.

Our primary wedding day was a tidal wave of joy. It lifted us up to heights of emotional experience that I had not previously encountered, carried us along on the shoulders of our dear ones who had gathered with us from all around the world to show their support for our union, and left us washed up on the shores of married life, intangibly but inexorably changed. I am not a religious person, but our wedding ceremony was definitely a spiritual experience—we were blessed by the sheer overwhelming force of love surrounding us that day in a way that we had not, could not have expected. I know that a wedding does not feel this way for everyone, and why should it—our weddings are surely as individual as ourselves—but I am a sensitive person, and that state of rapture which marked the beginning of our marriage has served as a welcome template for countering distress on the most ordinary of our days since.

Popular wisdom tells us that the first year of marriage is the hardest. Based on our experience of the last three years, I beg to differ. Our first year of married life was magical. The first few months were a long, slow comedown from the transcendental high of our wedding day, and the rest an extended honeymoon in which we played at this novel game of being husband and wife. All felt new, all was delightful, still bathed in the afterglow of the intense emotion radiating out from the day on which it began.

Year number two felt rather different, as we bedded down into the mundane but gritty reality of our marriage. It was a year in which big decisions were made and future plans laid involving careers, joint finances and expanding our family. It certainly had challenges of its own, including moving house, and parental illness, but also felt full of possibility—the same possibility bred and realised on our wedding day. As we made our plans and coped with the derailments of those that life occasionally threw at us, I came to more fully understand that within this marriage, as on our wedding day, we can make anything happen. No small revelation, that one.

But it was this year that I really gained an appreciation for the saying, ‘begin as you mean to go on’ as it applied to our marriage, and became truly thankful for those no less distant feelings of bliss that could be called upon to lift me up again when life was seriously hammering me down.

Continue reading Wedding Graduates Return: Marchelle & Three Years of Joy

Posted in: The Hard Stuff, Wedding Graduates Return | 43 Comments »

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