I really hate that I’m a tomboy.
Just kidding, that’s a total lie. I love being a tomboy. Gender expression is fucking fun (and can be super hot), and I sometimes don’t understand why every girl doesn’t want to wear suspenders. But, hey, different strokes, right?
I rejected most stereotypically feminine things growing up, a trait that really thrilled my mom. Barbie dolls given to me as gifts sat collecting dust, ignored in favor of hand-me-down G.I. Joes and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figurines. Not a lot about me has changed since I was five. (Seriously, someone give me a Michelangelo action figure right now and I’ll show you.) I like messing with gender roles and, most of the time, I’m very happy being a self-identified tomboy. Planning a wedding, however, revealed a small gap in my tomboy childhood.
“I feel like this would all be a lot easier if one of us had imagined our perfect wedding when we were little,” Steph, my then-fiancée, now-wife, lamented over a “wedding planning summit” one cold January morning. I thought about it between bites of hash browns. She was so right. (She usually is.) We’d been engaged for a couple of months already, trying to plan for a fall wedding, and had decided on pretty much nothing. We didn’t even know what state we were going to get married in yet.
The day after we got engaged, Steph and I settled into our couch with my laptop, eager to start planning. A brand new Google doc stared back, the blank page mocking us with its bright white emptiness. Steph, very reasonably, kicked things off by asking me if I had any thoughts about the overall tone of our wedding day. I’m pretty sure the only answer I gave her was “fun.” Not so helpful, Jenna.
I hadn’t really been able to put my finger on why, exactly, we were having so much trouble starting the wedding planning process. Or at least, I hadn’t until Steph dropped that particular knowledge bomb all over my breakfast potatoes that morning at our planning summit. For the first time in my life, I felt a pang of regret that I never doodled “Mrs. Jenna _______” in hearts all over my notebook. I wished that I had, just once, staged a mock wedding between my stuffed animals.
The thing I realized about being a queer lady getting married is that there are no rules. Seriously. Want to wear a wedding dress? Sure, that’s cool—but you totally don’t have to. Non-traditional prayer circle instead of a Mass? Why not!? Which can make it awesome and fun and exciting to plan a wedding, but also really hard to start.
We did, eventually, figure things out. Decisions were made in random bursts: “This place looks awesome, let’s book it.” “Hey, let’s get a bluegrass band to play ‘Crazy Love’ when we walk up!” “How do you feel about flowers made out of book pages?” Despite the early planning struggles, we realized that our wedding could be literally anything—and that’s pretty damn cool. The end result was perfect for us. Most importantly, I got to stand up in front of a bunch of people I care about and promise to keep loving Steph forever. And it was fun, too.
