reclaiming wife

Posts Tagged ‘Wedding Zen’

*Claire, Director of Disease Prevention & Christopher, Engineer*

Ok you guys. This is so good. It's just, so effing good. Claire and Christopher planned their wedding in just a month and found a way to dramatically simplify, while figuring out how to reclaim marriage and weddings from the cultural bullsh*t that they flat-out didn't believe in. Which isn't even mentioning how gorgeous and bad ass this wedding is. (Motorcycles. F*ck yeah.) But as amazing as this wedding is, it's just the prelude. Tomorrow morning, Claire will be back with a possibly-even-more-gorgeous post, discussing their marriage.

Before I was a Wedding Graduate, I was a Wedding Dropout. Before meeting the man who is now my husband, I had previously been engaged for two years to someone else. Looking back, I’m finally able to admit that my first reaction when I realized he was proposing was sheer panic. However, when the man you love is kneeling before you with tears in his eyes, asking you to accept his offer of everlasting love, "Um, I don’t think this is a good idea," just doesn’t seem like a possible response. So I said yes. I called my mom and tried my best to sound thrilled and deliriously happy.

But what I was really thinking was, "Oh shit. I just committed to something that I don’t think I really want. And now I don’t know how to fix it or what to do about it." So what I did was nothing. Literally nothing—years passed and we never set a date, or really got started planning the wedding. When I finally stopped suppressing my anxiety and actually listened to what my gut was telling me about this relationship, it became painfully clear that it just wasn’t right. So, after a year of trying to make things work in couples' therapy, I made the difficult and painful decision to call off the wedding and end the relationship. That sucked. A lot. I can’t tell you how helpful it was to read the thoughtful and supportive discussion APW started on this topic. Better than all that therapy, for sure.

Fast-forward a few months and I met Christopher after my girlfriends insisted that I post a profile on Match.com. I was clear with him from the get-go that I was planning to move out-of-state soon and wasn't looking for a serious relationship. Despite the safety barriers that I tried to put up, I shocked myself by falling madly in love with him and building a relationship with him that was better than I ever knew was possible.

I remember talking with Christopher early in our relationship about my suspicion that I would likely never marry due to my ambivalence toward the institution of marriage. Our conversation confirmed we shared many of the same key values and concerns, but then Christopher said something that made me rethink everything. He said, "You know, I think it is possible to get married on your own terms, without buying into all that bullshit. I don’t think it’s an either/or choice. Either you have to force yourself to fit into society’s narrow-minded little definition of marriage, or else you have to take yourself out of the game altogether? No. So call bullshit and play by your own rules." Wow. Right?

So that’s what we did. When we decided to join forces, we spent a lot of time talking through how we wanted to design the blueprint of our marriage to reflect and reinforce our values and what that meant for us.


I’ve always said I’m not really a wedding-planning kinda’ girl. What I meant was that I have little interest and few skills in party planning or wedding aesthetics in general. I’d never planned so much as a dinner party and the thought of planning a wedding filled me with fears of inadequacy. Besides, the idea of saying such intensely personal things in front of a crowd seemed nerve-racking and unnecessary. I wanted to elope and get on with our lives. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Claire & Christopher

We started this week with Manya's story about how crazy waiting to get engaged can make you and how you can be redeemed with your actions. So it only seemed right to follow that up with Brittany & Nick's story about how planning a wedding was making them crazy... and how they chose to let go of it all, and have a teeny tiny wedding where they followed their hearts and were surrounded by love.

Planning a wedding is like eating pancakes. Initially you’re super stoked—it’s gonna be so great, I love pancakes! There’ll be all these adornments—pecans and bananas and syrup and butter. Glorious! But a few pancakes in you’re sick and f’ing tired of pancakes… but you’ve already committed. So you feel like you have to finish the pancakes you’ve already started, and if you do, by the end you’re like EFF—I never liked pancakes in the first place! I’m never eating pancakes again! I don’t want to see another pancake recipe as long as I live. I might vomit. But what happens if you scrap the pancakes halfway in and decide to have an omelet instead?

Before I knew it, I was knee deep in pancake batter and there was no eating my way out. Nick and I, in a failed attempt to appease the masses, staked our claim on a moderately sized and well-antiqued bed and breakfast in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We hired string musicians, debated hors d’oeuvres, researched flowers, types of paper and invitations (embossed or just plain print? Will I be judged for cutting that God-Forsaken corner?), and all sorts of other sh*t that neither of us had ever cared about before. We were swept away in a monsoon of  half-a*sed concessions and sacrifices we swore we’d never make.

And then one lovely December afternoon, a request for a deposit came. Our venue wanted their cash to reserve the date, as it was merely five months away. It was timely, yet for some guttural reason unexpected. And with that brief three-lined email, my wedding-world-façade came crashing down. It was met with panic and hesitation. This would be the commitment to a wedding event that we didn’t want. I had been so sure, so committed to this pancake extravaganza we were cooking up. When in reality, we were egg people all along.


So I called my family. I told them we were eloping but they were most certainly invited. It would be in Savannah, Georgia over my Spring Break. Why Savannah? Why not. Why Spring Break? Because what else do you do Spring Break your senior year of college? And Nick did the same. They applauded our honesty and stood by our decision.

As for the rest of our wedding planning—it was cake (ha!). It consisted of picking flower colors, cake flavors, type of champagne and time of ceremony—all left up to my most wonderful partner Nick. There was one thing from the original plans we didn’t scrap—the photographers. We needed someone who would capture the day as we experienced it, and seeing as there would be few witnesses, this became even more of a priority. And we were so not disappointed by that decision! The photographers were two lovely ladies we found on APW who were equally as excited about the prospect of our elopement and were quickly onboard with the new plan.


Some people might have an aversion to a pre-packaged elopement, but it fit us just right. We didn’t want a courthouse elopement, but a full-fledged wedding wasn’t our style either. This allowed us to find our place in the wedding-spectrum that felt to be the most candid, unadulterated representation of who we are and what our unity represents. Oh, and when we told people we were eloping and our closest family would be there, the puzzled looks were promptly followed with, "Isn’t the point of eloping to have no one know? It isn’t an elopement if people are there and it’s planned!" We called it an elopement because that was the name of the package. We could have called it a small wedding, or an intimate commitment ceremony or a union gala. It wouldn’t have made a difference. All that mattered was Nick and I were there, it was exactly what we wanted, our family was joyous and we were surrounded by love on the most important, defining day of our lives.  Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Brittany & Nick Elope (Sort of)

Long time readers will remember Manya (who now writes at Safari Mama) from her Wedding Graduate post and her super brave post on the wedding she should have called off. Today's post is in Manya's usual frank and funny voice, and it's about the difficulties of knowing you want to marry someone before they are ready to marry you. When she sent me the first draft, I giggled all the way through it. I, too, once had a fake Kn*t account with a fake wedding date and read wedding magazines on the Subway "to relax." But Manya clearly hadn't let herself off the hook for the way she'd reacted to the cultural and emotional pressures of the pre-engaged state. So we talked about the ways we redeem ourselves through planning a wedding and building a life together, and she finally let go. So today's post is not just for the pre-engaged. It's for all of us who need to forgive ourselves, to finally laugh at ourselves, and get back to the hard work of loving ourselves, crazy behavior and all.

The word mortify has its roots in the word death. Over the ages it has meant “to kill” and “to bring about death,” and now it has been reigned in significantly to mean “to humble or embarrass.” Never have I understood this word better than the moment Brian and I officially entered “The Pre-Engaged State,” a profoundly awkward space that we inhabited for about eleven months.

I remember the exact moment I knew Brian was it. I was nestled in a pit of sand and we were talking about what we like to cook. I gazed up at the sky and felt something inside of my chest click into place, like a lock. Now he tells me that he sensed something had changed, and had thought to himself, "Oh, thank God. She’s crossed over too."

I started thinking about getting married far too soon for somebody who was not long off of a difficult divorce and who should have been worried about rebound. But my head was no match for my heart, so think I did. And dream. And surf websites. And open a secret file in my computer where I kept pictures of engagement rings. I might have sent one or two to my sister, in case Brian ever sought technical assistance. I might have spun the pantone wedding color wheel once or (a million times) twice. I registered on The Kn*t with a fictional wedding date. I mooned over Snippet & Ink. I made a virtual fool of myself, but no one was there to see. This went on for two years, and as our relationship grew better and better (not to mention older), I felt less foolish about it.

We traveled thousands of miles and had a Christmas together at my parents’, then two. I met his mom and stepdad, father and stepmom. I got to know and love his sons, and them me. Then we were at the beach and talked about whether it would be a nice place for a wedding. I told him about an idea for invitations—for someone who might be getting married. On our third Christmas together, our divorces were behind us, our relationship was thriving and (without ever talking to him), I became convinced he was going to seek my parents' blessing when we visited them over the holiday. Thus, I gave myself permission to (secretly) unleash my inner Bride, and using the excuse that they don’t have all the good wedding stuff in Kenya, I bought every single bridal magazine I could find. While Christmas shopping, I also sneaked into the local David’s Bridal to try on some dresses—just for fun.

While at David's Bridal, I felt sheepish, but excited and giddy. I tried on dresses, and juiced it up with the sales girl. I stretched the truth, and said Brian and I were getting engaged over the holidays. But I told the truth about our names, and I signed the guestbook and registered my favorites on a wish list, too happy about that short, cute little affordable dress to think to change a digit in my home phone number. By the time Brian arrived (a few days after I did), I had hidden the magazines under the bed. I didn’t want him to feel pressured, or let on that I had intuited his secret.

Then, two nights after my stealth visit to David's Bridal, as we all worked in my mom’s fragrant kitchen preparing a huge family meal, the phone rang and Brian answered.

“Hello, this is David’s Bridal. We’re calling to do a customer service follow up with Manya who was here visiting us this week. Would she be available?”

Brian summoned me to the phone with a quizzical look; “Honey? David’s Bridal for you? You were there this week?” Unfortunately, the woman on the other end overheard the endearment and after he said, “She’s coming” gushed, “Oooooh, you must be Brian! Congratulations on your upcoming Nuptials!”

As he handed me the phone, he whispered, “You marrying someone named Brian?” My heart stopped for a minute, but in the bustle of a Christmas kitchen I recovered by saying, “What? God, these telemarketers will say anything to get you on the phone these days!” During dinner my cheeks burned, but the light was dim, and I was wearing a turtleneck. By the time pie rolled around, all seemed forgotten.

He gave me a tiny box for Christmas that contained a beautiful…(!)… pair of diamond earrings; I bravely mustered the enthusiasm that the lavish gift deserved. A few days later, when it was time for Brian and the boys to go, my excitement had chilled like a post-Christmas house. Unless he had dragged my parents into the spidery basement where the water heater lives—and that is not how he rolls—Brian clearly had not asked for my hand. I took comfort in the knowledge that my inner Bridal frenzy was, at least, my secret.

As Brian packed his bags, I sat with him and cried a little and blamed it on the impending separation. I miss you already, I said as I swallowed my tears over the lump of disappointment in my throat. Oh, baby, me too, he said, as a roll of socks slipped out of his hands and rolled under the bed. He bent his 6’6” frame down and rummaged around under the bed, then cackled as he pulled out a glossy pile of magazines, “Oh dude, I think I just found somebody’s stash.”

Continue reading Mortification and the Pre-Engaged State

You may remember Rachael from her Wedding Undergraduate post this spring about Communication and Patience and the pre-engaged state. Rachael is a writer and editor, so it's no surprise that her Wedding Graduate story is one of importance. She speaks about battling anxiety (been there) and how her wedding day unfolded as liquid luck and pure joy. This is a must read story even if you have no weddings in your near future. It's a story of unexpected perfection and finding beauty in the cracks of life.

the accidentally perfect wedding

This is the story of how I accidentally had kind of a perfect wedding where I basically loved everything and everyone and nothing really went wrong.

the accidentally perfect weddingMy boyfriend Joe and I got engaged last December after eight years of dating. Back then, in the first days of winter, I felt prepared. Thanks largely to this very blog, I was armed to the teeth with wisdom and insight and plans for how to finagle a meaningful, sanely-planned celebration of our love out of the horrific mess that is the modern wedding industry. I knew about the preposterousness of dresses, the pitfalls of getting too wrapped up in centerpieces, the brain-poisoning allure of wedding blogs and the very real potential of unwittingly alienating my husband-to-be by becoming consumed with all of the above. I knew that I could ask our friends and family to move mountains and that they'd happily oblige, but also that they wouldn't (shouldn’t, couldn’t) stop being their wonderful, imperfect, human selves just for our wedding. I knew things could, and would, go wrong.

the accidentally perfect wedding

And much as I knew I couldn't expect weather or people or immutable facts of the universe to change just because it was my wedding, I also knew I couldn't expect myself to change just because it was my wedding. I knew that as long as Joe and I were married at the end of the day nothing else really mattered.

But I also didn’t want to look back on one of the most significant days of my life and see the whole thing through a sickly, gray fog.

Accidentally Perfect Wedding

All my life I've suffered from some degree of anxiety and its attendant panicky spells and hazy funks, some as brief as an afternoon and others lingering for weeks. Things are better now than they were a few years ago, mostly because I’m on a bit of medication and because I finally allowed myself to call my problem by its name and start thinking of it as a thing I could mostly control and not something that had me at its every beck and call.*

These days my anxiety is kind of like a moth caught under a lampshade across the room—I can tell it's there and sometimes it flutters and knocks around and distracts me but most of the time it lets me sit in peace. Still, I was worried. I was worried about being worried, because as many things as I knew I needed to brace myself for, I hadn't planned a wedding before, let alone my own wedding, and I didn't know what the huge amounts of stress (or the huge amounts of joy) might do to me.

Early on, Joe and I told our families that we didn’t want to lose our minds over the wedding and that we didn’t want anyone else to, either. It helped a lot, I think, to establish that. (It helped even more to just have great families to begin with.) To manage the logistical stressors, I did what I’ve almost always done to manage huge projects: I became hyper-planny, sussing out everything that needed to be done and everything that could potentially go wrong and working to work around those gone-wrong things before they even happened, all while knowing full well that everything could still go wrong anyway. This is technically called “defensive pessimism” but my preferred term is “pre-stressing,” which is kind of like “pre-gaming” but with less booze (although, actually, there was plenty of booze, especially after one of our bridesmaids threw us a stock-the-bar shower, a move that I totally recommend regardless of your chosen anxiety-management habits).

I feel like I should make this clear: I was pre-stressing, and I was also just-regular-stressing, but I wasn’t stressed out. This was the first time I really learned that there was a difference. I was, for the most part, enjoying myself and finding the whole planning process to be fun and exciting and challenging and rewarding. But there was also this low-grade humming pressure, this knowledge that things needed to be done, that people needed to be told what to do, that decisions needed to be made and plans enacted. Outwardly, I was pretty composed; even at the rehearsal dinner, I remember strutting past some family members and one of them exclaimed, “You’re just the calmest bride!” This was funny because at that moment I felt anything but calm—happy and honored and surrounded by a whole shit ton of love, yes, but not calm. So I replied with something like, “Heh, it’s called being DRUNK,” which I totally was not, but which proved inconvenient minutes later when I decided it was time for me to leave and they were all, “No, but you’re drunk!”

the accidentally perfect wedding

But beyond pre-stressing and surrounding myself with an amazing support group, I felt there wasn’t much I could do to make sure I was at my best on the actual day of the actual wedding. I tried to remember to drink water and get enough sleep. I tried to remember to thank everyone as much as I could and to remember the point of it all was to have fun and be married to Joe at the end. I decided I would just have to feel however I felt, however gnarly and off-kilter it might be. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Rachael & Joe

I've started to get a whole new class of emails asking for advice. I call them the, "So-and-so offered to plan my wedding and all I have to do is show up, and I really don't want to plan a wedding, but somehow it seems wrong to take them up on it—is it WRONG?" emails. And my answer is always, "DEAR GOD. LET THEM PLAN YOUR WEDDING." Think about it. Just a generation or two ago, the bride's family always planned the wedding. It's only our current obsession with *personalization* that puts the burden squarely on the bride (and sometimes the groom), so what's wrong with letting your community throw a party to honor you? Which is just what Emily & Aaron did when their roommates offered to plan things. And oh boy, was that the right decision. And Emily wore a Betsey Johnson wedding dress, which is also always clearly the right decision.

My husband and I didn’t plan our wedding. From day one, we handed it almost entirely off to our loved ones, and that turned out to be the best decision we made.

When Aaron and I decided to get married, the last thing I wanted to do was plan a wedding. To make a long story short, we’d been together for six years and were completely committed, but we wanted to wait to get married until our gay friends could do so as well. Then we started looking into joining the Peace Corps. Immediately our passion for service came up against our dedication to equality: In order to apply to the Peace Corps together, we needed to be married for at least one year. When it came right down to it, we agreed that we don't want to look back on our lives sixty years from now and see "what ifs." We decided to go for it.

Easier said than done! Add my issues with marriage equality to the fact that I’m not one of those women who can discuss wedding colors with my friends as though we’re on the United Nations Security Council, and you can imagine how excited I was about planning a wedding.

Here's where the real heroes of our wedding story come in: Our roommates. They are sisters, two of our closest friends, and an absolute blast to share a house with. They also happen to have über type-A personalities and a serious love affair with stress. The original wedding plan, as we ran it by the roomies in June, was: "We're going to the courthouse in August, and then we'll have a barbeque at the house afterward. No big deal." This was met with two sets of eyes rolling and "Just leave it to us." Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Emily & Aaron

It's hard for me to not fall deeply in love with a wedding in a half-finished tobacco warehouse, where the couple served Indian food (why doesn't everyone do this?), and where the pictures are gorgeous. But that's not the kicker on this Wedding Graduate post. The kicker is that Jessica is smart, and her advice is so dead-on, that it's hard not to fall head over heels in love with the whole thing...

Wedding planning opens the floodgates for advice… advice from Mom, Grandma, sisters, soon-to-be family, long-lost family, good friends, work friends, frenemies, colleagues, ladies at the grocery store, bloggers, bloggees, and just about anyone else out there. It’s exhausting. And, you know what, most of it can (and perhaps should) be ignored. So, as I am about to do some advising of my own, please—I invite you—to make your own path. Don’t do everything I say; it’s your wedding—for you, your partner, and your newly joined families and dear ones. Just do what feels right and have confidence in your vision.

Early in our planning, I read a post on APW in which a commenter said, “The theme of our wedding is marriage.” Matt and I loved that; we wanted something that felt inclusive, authentic, and bursting with love, without excessive pageantry or unmanageable expense. And, though certainly our marriage was the reason for the day, we would say that the “theme” of our wedding was community. As we transitioned from sort-of-adults (i.e. grad students) to adults-full-stop, it was our desire to use our wedding weekend as a way to express our gratitude to all of the family, friends, mentors, and advisers without whose support we would not be even half of what we are. We wanted all of these dear people to feel welcomed, appreciated, and loved… and we wanted them to have a blast. That’s a tall order…

What did we learn planning a community wedding on a small budget, while simultaneously starting our first job (Matt), graduating from medical school (Jessica), and buying a house? Well...

North Carolina community wedding

Stop Worrying About Whether Your Guests Will “Get It.” I worried and worried throughout our planning that our guests would not “understand” our wedding. What does that even mean? Well, I worried that they wouldn’t be able to find our ceremony venue (a still-being-renovated downtown warehouse), that they wouldn’t "get" the Indian food that we served at the reception (we love spicy things and Indian catering was affordable); I worried that they would wonder why our secular ceremony didn’t look like all the other wedding ceremonies they remembered, and that they would begrudge us our cake table, since we didn’t have a true "wedding cake," etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum.

On the day of the wedding, I kept worrying.  I worried that guests couldn’t hear our officiant’s gorgeous words during the ceremony; I worried that more people weren’t dancing; I worried that no one understood the toast that I thought was so heartwarming.

And, fact of the matter is, that worry pulled me from the moment. It brought stress to an otherwise blissful night. And—perhaps worst of all—it was unfounded. Numerous unsolicited comments in the days and weeks after the wedding showed me that my worries were not only off-the-mark, but in fact totally unnecessary. Our guests "got" it; they understood.


What I realize now is that, I didn’t give my guests enough credit. These are "our people." They know us and they recognized and appreciated our sensibilities all over this wedding. So, when you plan your wedding, know this: these are your wedding guests—people you know well and love. They’ll “get it.” You have my word on that. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Jessica & Matt