Weddings

Jul 2012

Moodeous Photography Denver

About a month or so ago, I took to wandering around the house saying, “Thank god we got married before I got knocked up,” and then cracking up and adding, “But totally not like that.” Which is to say, it turns out I was glad we got married first, simply because all of those painful emotional lessons that I learned during wedding planning are getting put to very good use for the second time around. (Least you get offended, I’m pretty sure this would work in the other order too, and I could have been wandering around saying “Thank god I got knocked up before we got married,” but I’ll leave that to those wiser than me to confirm or deny. Who wants to write a post on what you learn doing it in the other order?) But the moral of the story is, none of it was wasted.

Last week, we ran a post about how wedding planning was like project management, and @Kathleenincanrah (who I met on book tour, and who wrote this post on women and finance) piped up on Twitter to say, “Sort of, but sort of not.” Her response was that, “The heavy (and important) work is the emotional stuff. The to-do lists are false processes to do the real work.” And I think for me that was mostly accurate. Half of our wedding planning was project management (something we were blessedly good at, after being a former theatrical producing team) and half of our wedding planning was emotional work (which we felt like a total disaster at, doesn’t everyone, always?). The project management half of wedding planning didn’t end up being a life lesson. The emotional work, however, is still paying dividends. Or rather, is suddenly paying huge dividends again.

Of course I’m writing this for those of you who have been up half the night, at any point in the last few months, sobbing over something vaguely related to wedding planning. Because you and me both sister. Eye to eye: it’s worth it.

As I have been making my way through pregnancy (I want to feed our Hallmark-y images of pregnancy by saying I’ve been drifting through it, but instead I’ve been grinding through it and surviving it, so you’ll have to turn elsewhere for more diaphanous images) issues keep coming up, and the solutions feel like muscle memory. As anyone who’s ever been vaguely athletic knows, it’s painfully hard to build up a muscle the first time; it’s much easier to tone it up the second time around. Emotional muscles work much the same way. Once you’ve tuned up your emotional response to something, figuring out how to do it again, even after a lengthy pause, is much easier (if not exactly painless).

So, for those of you in the trenches of wedding planning, and for those getting ready to go for another round (be that in baby acquiring, or other major life decisions) here are the wedding planning lessons that are proving to be priceless in my current state (for your reference, here are the lessons as recorded the first time around, in my own wedding graduate post):

It’s not your business what other people think of you. This gem came to me via Christina of Steady Happy (her amazing wedding graduate post is here). This ended up being my mantra during wedding planning, when I wasted way too much time worrying what other people were thinking of the way we were planning the thing, or what they might think about the wedding. First of all, it really did all work out in the end. Learning to stand up for the way we do things was the single biggest lesson of wedding planning. Second of all, honest to God? It’s not my business what other people think of me. Interestingly, this time around I get that. Sometimes I have to remind myself hard not to care about the widespread cultural conversation about what I should be doing, but on an individual level? We’re just doing our thing, and letting people think whatever they think.

It’s your job to present a clear plan to your loved ones, if you need them to follow your lead. Looking back, I realize that I made wedding planning more complicated than it needed to be by being too nice (I know, right?). That is to say, instead of politely telling people what was happening, I asked them how they felt about what was happening, or what they wished was happening, and then got myself in a total tangle doing things that I knew were dead wrong for me in an effort to make other people happy. (Hot tip: that almost always ends in disaster.) Now, if I know what we need, I do my best to guide friends and loved ones through it, kindly, but without apology. Continue reading Why Wedding Planning Is Worth It

Posted in: Friends & Relations, Marriage, Meg's Thoughts, Planning, Weddings | 91 Comments »

Jul 2012

BackTalk: Why Do We Marry?

Last week’s New York Times Modern Love column, by Jessica Bennett, executive editor of Tumblr, hit me right in the gut. The story was this: she and her boyfriend got engaged before she was quite ready, she called off the engagement almost immediately, though they stayed together. As the years went by she became an advocate for not getting hitched in the first place (she authored Newsweek’s 2010 cover story “The Case Against Marriage.”) And then her relationship broke up, and she reconsidered.

While I fully suggest reading the whole, and lovely, piece, here are some outtakes, which I think many of us will nod our heads over:

The story:

And yet the moment I saw that ring, I was terrified. I saw dirty dishes and suburbia, not lace-covered wedding gowns. Rather than thinking about the family we’d someday have, I saw the career I had hardly started as suddenly out of reach. The independence I had barely gained felt stifled. I couldn’t breathe.

I begged him to forgive me. I cried and pleaded. I promised I’d never leave him, and I meant it.

He was devastated, but he loved me too much to let go. So we came back to New York, to our tiny apartment, and tried to move on. We held each other — that night, and every night after. I cried and stroked his hair. I said I was sorry. I told him I loved him. We slowly moved forward.

There were plenty of times over the next six years that I wished I had said yes. We could have had a long engagement, I told myself. In a few years, I would have been ready.

But as time went on, as our couple friends broke up, as those who were the first to marry became the first to get divorced, I was glad we hadn’t done it.

We were happy living as partners, without the pressure of “till death do us part.” We were free of all the expectations of matrimonial bliss that make so many couples fall apart.

Her original conclusion:

A few data searches, some interviews and a pitch to an editor later, we were issuing a manifesto of our own. “I Don’t,” we would proclaim a few months later in a 2010 cover line in Newsweek: “The Case Against Marriage.”

Our argument took romance out of the equation. As we explained it, Americans were already waiting longer to marry, and fewer than ever believed in the “sanctity” of marriage. As urban working women in our 20s, we no longer needed marriage to survive — at least not financially. We weren’t religious, so we didn’t believe that unmarried cohabitation or even child-rearing was an issue.

But we were also cynical. As children of the divorce generation, we had watched cheating scandals proliferate in the news. We had given up on fairy tales, and we didn’t know how anybody could see the institution of marriage as anything but a farce. It was “broken,” one sociologist told me. So, what was the point?

The Finale:

When we got back to New York, he packed up his stuff, quit his job, paid a final month’s rent and moved back to his hometown, 2,000 miles away.

In the end, we had no shared bank account or property. We didn’t have to go through a trial separation or mandatory counseling. We had spent seven years living in a 600-square-foot New York City apartment, inseparable and intertwined. Yet in the end, the relationship ended in one night. No discussion required.

As I tried to make sense of it all, I had a glimpse into why that sheet of paper had been so important to him. Sure, it may well be a jaded tradition, an antiquated ritual. But it’s also a contract.

When he was packing his stuff, I remembered a conversation my Newsweek co-author had had with her mother about our article. “I’ll tell you why you need marriage,” she told her. “Because it makes it harder for the other person to leave.”

At the time, we snickered at her words. Legally requiring someone to stick around? It was desperate, pathetic.

But would it have worked? I’ll never know. What I have learned is this: While “happily ever after” may indeed be a farce, there’s something to be said for uttering “I do.”

Reading this article brought up complicated feelings for me. First, as Jessica Bennett nails in her eloquent change of heart, we don’t all need to be married. Marriage is far from a perfect institution, and it’s not right for every couple. The pressure for every couple to get married, and for marriage to validate all our relationships is, of course, absurd. Relationships are made valid by love and commitment, not by a ceremony, or a piece of paper that not everyone is legally allowed to get.

But it also brought me around to the question of our age group’s relationship with marriage. Continue reading BackTalk: Why Do We Marry?

Posted in: Marriage, Meg's Thoughts, Weddings | 144 Comments »

Jun 2012

Make Up

Last week, I had one of those rare experiences where you get to go back and help figure something out for your past-self (and hopefully, somehow, karmically pay it forward to the universe). Last week, we did a hair and makeup shoot on a pony farm (proper photos to be revealed in the future). Now, those of you who were reading Way Back When will remember that one of the things I had a philosophically hard time with during wedding planning was getting my hair and makeup done. You see, I wanted to get professional hair and makeup done (I didn’t get it done, but that’s another story), but I didn’t want to sell out into some wedding industry version of perfection. Because honestly, in the last few months before our wedding, the wedding industry’s version of perfect weddings was freaking me out so much I was breaking into cold sweats, not totally sure if we could have a wedding that was OURS, and not the wedding industry’s.

But it wasn’t just my internal screaming matches with the WIC. Specifically, I was having a hard time fitting together my feminist principles with the wedding industry standards of bridal beauty (because, to be fair, those things totally do not fit together). So I got to thinking that if I participated in any way in bridal beautification rituals, I would be selling myself down the river. That it was all or nothing. (Hint: It’s almost never all or nothing.)

Here is the thing I was failing to pay attention to: I’m Not That Kind of Feminist. The phrase is in all caps, because I use it so often. Basically, there are a bazillon ways to be a feminist (please don’t let anyone tell you differently). And after taking all the Women’s Studies classes in college, and doing tons of reading, I still chose to just as actively and self-fully embrace displays of more-traditional-femininity as I did when I was four and would only leave the house in a skirt. In short: I wear heels (a lot), I wear make up (most days), I wear glittery dresses (whenever I can), and I wear pencil skirts (because they make my ass look excellent). I do all these things in a conscious, constructed way, but I do them because I like them (not, frankly, because I give a shit if anyone else, male or female, likes them). I do them because I’ve always found that more-overtly-feminine expression is intrinsically part of my aesthetics, and deeply empowering when approached properly. Or as I read fifteen years ago in a review for Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth and never forgot, “If I can’t wear cowboy boots to the revolution, then I’m not coming.” Or in other words, no one gets to control my looks, patriarchy OR matriarchy.

But all this got really damn confusing to me during wedding planning. I’ve always been a study in duialities. I was a kid with a hippy upbringing, who grew up in a deeply conservative and very poor environment, and went to college with a lot of really wealthy kids. To survive, I learned to pass. Depending on the situation, I can put different parts of myself on display as needed. But wedding planning is this moment where you have to pull all your disperate idenities together to be one person, in front of a room full of people that know you from all different parts of life… at a moment that seems like it has a huge amount of symbolic weight. Continue reading Make Up

Posted in: Meg's Thoughts, Weddings | 138 Comments »

May 2012

Confronting Tradition: Weddings and Feminism

A few weeks ago, I was asked to write a post for Etsy about Feminism and Weddings. I knew I had a lot to say on the subject, but while I was writing it, I decided to do a quick poll on Facebook and Twitter, to find out what wedding decisions people were struggling with in the context of feminism. Well. I’ve never gotten that many responses to a question so quickly. Turns out we’re all struggling and not getting to discuss it near enough. So, given that, and how proud I am of the piece, I’m running an excerpt here… because I want to be sure that you go over to Etsy and read the whole story. We need to talk about this, clearly (both comment sections are yours for the discussion of struggles and joys).

Tattoo Wedding Ring

I’ve considered myself a feminist for as long as I can remember. And I mean that literally. I used to lecture other little kids on the playground (in my dress, because I only ever wore dresses) about how girls could do anything. This sounds somewhere between pushy and adorable, until you realize that I didn’t grow up in some liberal enclave, but in a hyper-conservative part of inland California that is more or less part of the Bible Belt. My tiny outspoken feminism was met with raised eyebrows in elementary school, and with outright hostility by middle school. This, of course, never stopped me.

But I was never as keenly aware of my feminism as when I got engaged. Culturally, major life transitions have been set up so that the woman has the more visible role (see this excellent article from The Rumpus about the public implications of being a pregnant woman). Weddings are the kick-off. After the flurry of excitement when we announced we were getting hitched, things calmed down considerably for my (now) husband David. He got the traditional back slap and “Congrats, man” from friends and then conversation moved on to other things. For me, not so much. Now, mind you, I was pretty excited to talk about pretty wedding stuff with my girlfriends, but what I wasn’t expecting was that I would suddenly be in a very public spotlight.

When I got engaged, I happened to be at a very old-fashioned workplace. And suddenly, not only did I feel like public property, I felt like public property in the 1950s. Men routinely warned me not to spend all my my fiancé’s money on my dress (I was supporting both of us). When I showed my carefully selected small-for-my-small-hand estate ring, eyebrows were visibly raised at its size (wasn’t my fiance supposed to be a provider?). And then there were the endless questions (or really, assumptions with a question at the end) about my dad walking me down the aisle, my brides-”maids,” and my impending name change.

What I wouldn’t have given for a back slap and a “Congrats, lady.”

At the same time that I was uncomfortably standing in my new found lady-spotlight, I was trying to sort through my feelings on feminism and weddings. If there is one moment in our lives where we’re forced to confront how we feel about gender equality, it’s weddings. Let’s be frank: weddings don’t have the Very Best History when it comes to women. The issues range from the basic: women being traded from man to man as property, right up to women not being able to hold a credit card except in her husband’s name (true until the 1970s). So, when we decide to get married, we decide to reclaim and remake the institution of marriage, and shape it into something that works for us. And, of course, we have to deal with wedding traditions with problematic histories. The toughest part is, whatever decision we make on a given issue, our resulting choice is going to be very very public, and we’re going to have a lot of ‘splaining to do.

In case you were wondering if agonizing over feminist wedding choices is widespread, well, while working on this article, I did a snap poll on Twitter and Facebook, asking women which decisions were painful for them. The answers poured in faster than anything I’d ever seen (200 in an hour), with rather visible agony.

Read the rest on Etsy…

Photo by Hart and Sol West (APW Sponsor)

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Posted in: Meg's Thoughts, Weddings | 67 Comments »

Apr 2012

Classic APW: My Wedding Dress

When we were pondering talking about the idea of “Change of Plans” this week and how changing plans is somehow the very core of wedding planning (both its hell and its unexpected joy), I decided that I had to revisit my wedding dress search. For the handful of you who were around reading back when I was getting married, this is a three-years-later reflection on a story you know. But for the rest of you, I hope this encourages you through whatever your particular wedding trial is. And I do mean trial.

For me, finding a wedding dress was fraught right from the start. The wedding dress search somehow boiled down every single aspect of the wedding industry that I disliked into one compact package. Plus, I’ve had a very defined personal style since I was three, (when I flat-out refused to wear anything that wasn’t a skirt out of the house. My poor feminist mother thought she’d failed, but she’d really just gotten a very tiny, very femme feminist). Add to the fact that, I shit you not, when I got my first piggy bank at five, I told my mom I did not want to save for college, I wanted to save for my wedding dress (again, cut to distressed feminist mother). So I cared about the wedding dress, from the get-go. Plus I hated every single modern wedding dress trend. And I really hate the feeling of being ripped off.

For those of you who didn’t see it, just the other week, NPR’s Planet Money team came out with a investigative research video (a must watch, there) that proves without a shadow of a doubt what I suspected with every fiber of my being during wedding dress shopping: the whole thing is a shake down. It’s not that I wasn’t ready to spend good money on a wedding dress (Hello! I’d saved a little yellow piggy bank full of quarters! This is not a joke!) it’s that I wasn’t willing to pay more than twice what a dress was worth, just because it was white and poofy.

And then, everything that could go wrong started to go wrong. A short sum up of things I never shared at the time: I found a short vintage-style dress that I loved (that, funny enough, was basically a slightly less cool copy of the actual vintage dress I would get married in) at a shopping trip with our best man’s wife. I was all set! Then a month later, said wife left said best man, in step one of what would prove to be the world’s most painful divorce. I couldn’t think of the wedding dress without bursting into tears. This seemed like a bad sign. I had another dress shopping trip with amazing Kate (now APW editor) and a brand new close friend… who a few months before the wedding announced her new boyfriend didn’t like us, so she was out of our lives. Amazing. It started to feel like my wedding dress search was cursed. In retrospect, perhaps the universe was delaying me, so I could learn something useful (which is a damn life lesson, if you ask me, and one I always find particularly unpleasant no matter how many times it happens).

Let’s do a quick review of my wedding dress shopping:

Wedding Dress Shopping Round One:

Most of the dresses I saw looked like they were designed by a four-year-old girl. The little tiny designer clearly kept stamping her foot and saying “More ruffles! Longer train! Add some bows! Poofy-er! And I want a BIG tiara!”

And then they sent in a 13-year-old girl to bedazzle the dresses (and the veils, and the shoes). Continue reading Classic APW: My Wedding Dress

Posted in: Dilemmas, Meg's Thoughts, Planning, Style, Weddings | 67 Comments »

Mar 2012

Wedding Planning: You’re Doing It Right!

The other day (because God loves me?) I was working at a cafe, when a group of wedding planners got in a screaming fight in front of me. The whole thing was one of the most entertaining things that’s ever happened to me while working in public, since they were screaming about antiques and chandeliers, and then kept mentioning their business’ name (which of course I immediately looked up… obviously). But the most fascinating part was when the screaming match turned into a yell-y discussion of how to best make your clients book all the people you want them to, even if it costs them literally boat loads of money that they don’t want to spend. Awesome.

They said (yelled) that the best way to sell their preferred caterer was to explain to clients that this caterer cooked on site, and most caterers cooked off site (true, by the way, since you’re paying for the caterer’s kitchen), which meant that if you hired someone else, when the food arrived, it wasn’t going to be precisely the proper temperature. Leaving aside the fact that this isn’t even true (most caterers worth their salt will reheat as needed), it so profoundly missed the point of a wedding that I felt sort of… gleeful? I immediately had an image of all the guests pulling out their insta-read thermometers at once (the perfect favor?), and checking the temperature of their steak, only to tsk-tsk when they found it a few degrees low.

This, of course, just highlighted for me the difference between an awesome wedding planner and a shitty one. I mean first, I think we can all agree that you don’t need a wedding planner (though you do need someone in charge on the day of that’s not you, friend or hired). But if you’re going to get a wedding planner, you want an awesome one, who considers it part of their job to tell you: 1) You’re Doing Wedding Planning Right. 2) You Don’t Have To Spend A Crap Ton Of Money. 3) Your Wedding Is Going To Be Excellent Because It’s Yours. And 4) We Can Problem Solve Together.

Which brought me to thinking about, well, ourselves. Because the wedding planners I described are nothing more than the good and bad angels of the wedding industry, as I see it. One is about shaming and guilting you to think that you’re not enough (so you spend All The Money), and one is about helping you see that you ARE enough (and, who cares if you spend more money?). And while nothing is ever that simple, exactly, I do think we’ve all absorbed both of these perspectives into ourselves (the former a little too much). Continue reading Wedding Planning: You’re Doing It Right!

Posted in: Meg's Thoughts, Planning, Weddings | 63 Comments »