Dilemmas

May 2012

Wedding Undergraduate: Something Like Zen

Well. You didn't really think we were going to get through this week without a wedding planning post about Staying, did you? Of course not. This post by Sarah is about that classic APW topic of somehow finding Wedding Zen, of finally being able to stay in the moment through, well, struggle. It made me go reread Alyssa's classic Wedding Graduate post (now in the APW book), and my post on my own cake hunt and planning realizations. Because other than the part about not planning her wedding since she was six (um, I started planning mine at four), this post could have been written from inside my head. In fact, reading it, I felt the ghost of past-planning-Meg sitting on my shoulder. All of it sounded so familiar: stressing about not stressing, not wanting to include people who you feel won't hold true to your vision, and then caving and letting people lift you up.

This, wedding undergraduates, is my confession: it is so insidiously easy to overplan your wedding.

I haven't been planning my wedding since I was six. Until I got engaged last August, I never spent a lot of time looking at bouquets and favors in craft stores. I made concentrated efforts in school—which I am impressed with, in retrospect, because it was insight I had no clue I would ever need—to enjoy my time with friends and not worry about dating, and especially not worry about marriages or babies or any of the Big Changes I was nowhere close to ready to experience. I am definitely the last person you'd expect to be anxiously going through page after page of monogrammed anything six months before the wedding.

Several friends and my brother have gotten married in the past couple years, and the more I gleaned from their processes, the more I sort of mocked the whole wedding industrial complex. My bright, crafty pals shared with me the triumphs of venues and the bummers of sticker price, so I thought by the time my wedding process began, I was prepped. I thought that armed with the reflected glow of their nuptials, I could do the whole thing. By myself. On the super-cheap. With zero stress. And it would still look chic as hell.

Well, as you can guess, this combination of options is awesome but didn't happen. One of my friends told me I would stress, stress, stress about the details and so I became determined to not stress about anything. This started a chain reaction of becoming very defensive about all of my decisions. I blocked out my friends, my mom—everyone but my fiancé, and he has been so genuinely calm about the whole thing that he wants whatever I like the best.

My very-soon-to-become-my-husband Joe is a very laid-back character when it comes to most things. He gets intense about his work and he listens to me fiercely when I have something on my mind, but generally speaking he takes things as they come. He doesn't have to-do lists or concerns about how to spend an afternoon, and there is definitely zero fuss about what he is going to wear to any specific occasion. He even has a large Latin tattoo on his leg that means, "It is what it is." I'm much more, "It is what I think it should be maybe today but you know we'll check back on it and hopefully it will get better." That phrase doesn't fit quite as elegantly on the ankle. Continue reading Wedding Undergraduate: Something Like Zen

Posted in: Planning, Planning, The Day Itself, Wedding Undergraduates | 34 Comments »

May 2012

Zen: The Dress Rules

I made a lot of rules for myself about The Dress, because I loooove dresses and I was a little afraid of what I might do when unleashed in a world of lace and tulle. They weren't rules with any rational basis; they were just rules based on the fact that part of me still guiltily believes that an intelligent human being has no business being interested in what she wears.

Rule: I would not spend anything close to $1,500 on my wedding dress, because that would be silly. (Note: No rational basis, since I can afford it, and hey, fashion is art. If Damien Hirst's preserved corpses can command large sums of money there's no reason Oscar de la Renta's lace dresses shouldn't.)

Rule: I must not have to wear Spanx in order to look good in the dress.

Rule: The dress must be slightly different, but not so much as to cause unfavourable comment. However I must also feel like myself and not just some generic bride when wearing it.

Rule: I wouldn't buy more than one dress. I'd just choose one for the English wedding and stick with it. (For the Chinese wedding it's usual for brides of my socio-economic background to wear more than one dress in the course of the day.)

My search for the Dress started well. I went dutifully to one bridal salon, out of a vague concern that I'd be sorry to have missed the experience of twirling in pretty dresses before admiring friends. To my relief, I found that wedding dresses are just like other dresses—one feels exactly like one's ordinary self in them. I'd worried that it would be a Say Yes to the Dress kind of transcendental experience in which I'd be convinced to part with huge wads of cash because the dresses made me feel so pretty, but this didn't happen. Continue reading Zen: The Dress Rules

Posted in: Planning, Planning: Journeys, Wedding Undergraduates | 33 Comments »

May 2012

Why We Changed Our Minds About Babies (For Now)

This post from Kristine is about not getting pregnant and deciding... that... was ok. This post made me feel drawn into a huge and warm hug. Not because infertility is easy (it's decidedly not). But because there is very little cultural narrative that tells us that it's ok to not have kids once we start down the kids road. Or that it's ok to throw in the towel on getting pregnant (for awhile or forever). Or, really, that it's ok to BE OK in the midst of really hard stuff. It's really important for me personally, to know that it's fine if it's really hard, and it's fine if it's... fine. Or that both can coexist at once, the pain and the healing. So here is Kristine on changing plans and on deciding not to have kids (for now).

When Steve and I got married six months ago, we immediately hopped on the baby-making bandwagon. At forty (him) and thirty-one (me), we were feeling a little crunched for time, especially because our “plan” involved two or three little ones. With a congenital endocrine disorder, I knew that our chances of avoiding trouble-free conception and pregnancy experiences were slim anyway. We both love kids and we both wanted to be parents. Badly. So we threw away the birth control two weeks before our wedding and dove in headfirst. We called it “not avoiding,” but who were we kidding? We wanted to make a baby.

The idea of creating life made our intimate moments deeper (and interestingly, hotter). We were baby-making machines and it excited us both in new ways.

Then something happened. We didn’t get pregnant.

Six months of planning, and expecting and hoping and timing and charting cycles, and nothing happened. I was in the midst of my final semester of graduate school and Steve was feeling professionally stuck. I’m sure my body was raging with cortisol, which made it a hostile environment for any fertilized egg that dared enter my uterus. I had gained more weight than I care to discuss, and I knew deep down that getting pregnant at this time was unhealthy for me and very unhealthy for any baby. Continue reading Why We Changed Our Minds About Babies (For Now)

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife, The Hard Stuff | 210 Comments »

Apr 2012

Relationship Vo-Tech

This week, we wanted to explore the concept of Staying. Staying as in not moving, not making a big change, keeping things more or less as they are. We live in a culture that's pushing us to always make a big change, to always move forward, and do the next big thing. And the truth is, that's not always possible (or even advisable). And in this particular economy, we can't always move on to grand things. Sometimes the next step is a tiny one: It's learning to be happy with what we have, or making one small change. So it seemed perfect to start this week with a topic that has come up over and over on APW: waiting for the engagement. And in this post, M. has decided that she's fine with what she has. No ultimatums, no waiting—just being together and being happy. And it turns out, this post about non-engagement might be the most important post on engagement that we've ever run.

I'm not planning a wedding. Not even close.

Two years ago, a few months after my boyfriend Bo and I started dating, we went to a wedding together. It was the kind of wedding where, along with all the bride and groom's invited guests, their whole church congregation was asked to come, and the reception was just champagne and cake in the church basement. It was beautiful, and we loved how inclusive it was, but we both said that if either of us had a wedding, it wouldn't be like that. (Good—I thought—even though he says he doesn't think he'll ever get married, he's thinking about it. It's only a matter of time.)

Then, that fall, another wedding—this time for friends of mine from college. A very beautiful, traditional Jewish wedding—one where the bride and groom couldn't stop grinning out of sheer happiness. We shared their joy, but again, we said, were either of us to get married, it would be different. (Well, he's still saying "If I ever have a wedding," not "If we ever have a wedding," but if he's got opinions, that's got to be good, right?)

Last summer, we went to the wedding of one of Bo's cousins, and it was flashy, pink, and ostentatious. (There were professional fireworks! it was held in a place called "The Palace"!) We laughed and laughed—it fit his cousin perfectly—but there would never be any fireworks for us!

And by then I had realized that there really weren't going to be any wedding fireworks for us. Because we'd probably never get married.

Continue reading Relationship Vo-Tech

Posted in: Engagements & Proposals, The Hard Stuff, Wedding Undergraduates | 83 Comments »

Apr 2012

Marrying the Sh*t Out of Myself

After our week of exploring Deal Breakers and Hope Rising, I knew I wanted to end on a post about hope—about how hope can spring from the unlikeliest and most difficult of places. So, I asked a wise lady I love (who's anonymous for this one) if she'd be willing to write a post about how, in the darkest days of her marriage, she realized that she had finally married the shit out of herself. Because in my life, it's those moments, born through truly painful struggle, that have changed me forever in the most worthwhile ways.

It’s funny how things just haven’t turned out quite as we'd hoped when we got married. Sure, we knew that life is nothing if not one big gamble, but had you asked me on my wedding day over three years ago what state I really thought our marriage might be in were we to find ourselves apparently infertile but longing for children, with one of us unwillingly unemployed, while being forced to live apart indefinitely all at the same time, I'd probably have raised an eyebrow and said something eloquent and erudite along the lines of "Royally F*cked".

Which is why it's somewhat surprising that one Monday morning a couple months ago, I declared to some close friends, "Today feels like my wedding day. I feel like I found my true self again, then married the shit out of her." That was the morning of the day I officially became formally unemployed, sealing the deal on our triple whammy of an ordeal, and the furthest thing conceptually from the ecstatic and transformative day to which it was being compared. And yet, that comparison could not have been more apt.

Of course, it was hard work getting to that hopeful place through a seemingly never-ending deluge of crap. Physically, emotionally, financially, socially—we've both taken significant blows over the past couple years as things have spiralled to their current position. I have failed exams, and failed to impress sufficiently at interviews, after a lifetime of seemingly effortless, high-flying achievement. He has lived in a hideous room in a horrible shared flat while working more hours than either of us likes to count, because it's just what needs must, at least for now.

Friendships have been neglected outright as precious, fleeting weekend and holiday time is devoted to reconnecting with each other. I've gained, and lost, and gained, and lost again somewhere in the region of 20 pounds over and above what was a previously irritatingly stable, healthy adult weight, the fluctuations of my body mirroring those in my mind. He’s grown worryingly thin. We've both visibly aged—in pictures of us from just 5 years ago we look like children. So relaxed, so naive, so free from lined, careworn brows and tired, heavily encircled eyes. And yet... Continue reading Marrying the Sh*t Out of Myself

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife, The Hard Stuff | 22 Comments »

Apr 2012

How I Very Nearly Almost Cheated On My Husband

We started this week discussing cheating. In that story, an emotionally abusive marriage was falling apart, an affair happened, a marriage ended, and a new life started. Easy and ethical? No. True? Yes. Today, we have a post from Emily Threlkeld (who you'll remember from her New Orleans elopement, her story about managing through immigration hurdles, and her Confessions of a Bridal Registry Consultant) about the affair she almost had. It turns out, most affairs and almost-affairs have a reason. A miserable life you don't know how to escape, maybe. Or in Emily's case, the singlehood she never mourned, and the new marriage she hadn't had a chance to process. I hope, more than anything, today's post will snap on a light bulb for someone about to make a not-right-for-them decision. That it will help them figure out WHY they wanted to make the choice in the first place.

I toyed with submitting this post anonymously, but decided against it. My husband knows all the details I’m about to lay out for you, and while I agree that my behavior was self-destructive and wrong, I’m attaching my name to this post because I think that APW is a safe place where we can discuss our lives as thoughtful adults and leave the shame (and shaming) at the door. That said: Mom, if you found this through Google, please go read something else.

I married the first man I had sex with. He’s definitely not the last person I slept with, but he was the first. Like most people, I had other lovers, ranging from the sensible to the ill advised, all who came after my husband and I broke up in college. But it wasn’t old lovers that got me into trouble; sometimes it’s the ones you don’t sleep with.

Many years ago, before I even met my husband, there was this guy. He had great taste in music and was probably the first person you’d pick to go on a bender with, if that paints a picture. Now I’m hardly the type of girl to go on a bender, but at the same time, at eighteen, I hadn’t ruled out the possibility.

At some point when we were still dating—we met a year later, when I was nineteen and a freshman in college—Ian asked me if I thought that we would have met if we hadn’t picked the same place to get our degrees, and I answered truthfully: “I don’t think so. I think we would have met other people that suited us.” My logical engineer surprised me by disagreeing. “I think we would have found each other anyway,” he said.

I love his certainty, and I find it sweet, but I it’s not a belief I subscribe to. I don’t think there’s just one person for everyone, because I don’t think we are just one person ourselves. Life is too messy for that. Yes, I’m the girl that married the first person she slept with, but I’m other girls, too. If it hadn’t worked out with Ian, or if it doesn’t in the future, I know that there are still people in the world that I could connect, fall in love, and start a life with. Continue reading How I Very Nearly Almost Cheated On My Husband

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife, The Hard Stuff | 117 Comments »