Our wedding planning started on a sick day in late October. We had talked about getting married for a while, but no one had formally proposed yet. The ring was in progress, but we knew that we had to get married in the summer, and it was now nine months away. So one day I had a cold and, as a balm for feeling sorry for myself, I just started Googling wedding venues. Within half an hour, I had a spreadsheet going. (Little did I know, however, that the wedding industry wasn’t quite ready for a straight man who is planning his own wedding.)
Ideas and inspiration came and I had to write it down, enter it into a spreadsheet, and start setting up the bones of an event. It hit this deep part of my brain that loved building things with Legos as a kid, except instead of bricks, the creation is made of places, food, music, and people. My fiancée didn’t like having to track plans, and was dreading having to organize a wedding. Still, she is good at making decisions. I can research a ton of options and paralyze myself with weighing pros and cons, but she’s able to look at everything and know exactly what she wants.
So we thought that this was going to be a great balance. We could be a team and complement each other, and hooray for being one of those couples where the wedding plans are the result of an equal partnership. The ring eventually arrived and we started planning in earnest. Yet, what we quickly realized was that most vendors are just accustomed to working with only one half of the couple. Even if both partners are all-in on the planning, it’s a challenge to actually make it work.
At first it was kind of amusing. We both have androgynous names and would smirk when some event planners or caterers would meet us and be momentarily flummoxed because they either thought that Cris was my bride’s name or that they had been dealing with an LGBT couple, as if the idea of a groom in a heterosexual partnership being the primary wedding planner was a wedding Sasquatch.
But then we started running into more ordinary frustrations. Like, oh my god, why is it so hard for people to routinely Reply All to emails? Why are email threads still the default memory for planning anything? I wanted to keep my fiancée involved in the planning, but we’d sit down at dinner and I’d ask for her thoughts on a catering proposal and she’d look at me and say, “I haven’t seen that proposal yet.” and I’d realize that the vendor didn’t include her on their reply.
So, I started setting up more spreadsheets, more docs, and a Trello board. I thought that this way would make it easier to keep everyone on the same page about our to-dos, checklists, and budgets, especially as we assembled our wedding party and got more people involved. (I did stop short of setting up a Slack team because I didn’t want to be One of Those People.)
All the same, I would get disappointed when my fiancée would ask a question that was clearly written down in one of our twenty and growing number of Trello cards. I was stressed when she wasn’t keeping up on filling in addresses for her side of the guest list spreadsheet. Before that disappointment turned to resentment, I took a step back and realized that my fiancée’s preferred interaction with technology is through her phone, and her preferred planning tool is a paper notebook. She doesn’t enjoy sitting in front of a computer when at home, and navigating a budget spreadsheet or sprawling project board on a five-year-old Verizon phone kind of sucks.
Sometimes she wouldn’t get everything and would need to defer to me when her mom would ask her about the plans for the setup timeline for the ceremony. I wouldn’t remember everything that we agreed to with the florist. That’s all okay. Our collective brains had it all, and there was never a question that we couldn’t answer just by talking to each other, usually over the dinner table, at our evening check in.
Finally, as the big day approached, I took those Trello cards and spreadsheets and rewrote them into a two-page Word doc of volunteer notes that I emailed to our wedding party and volunteers. The timetable spreadsheet was also emailed out, and everyone came to the wedding with printouts of our common plan. Our venue planners and best people would talk about The Timetable like it was our shared gospel. My fiancée forgot her notebook with the sketched out seating chart for our rehearsal dinner, but because she had written it down before, she was able to setup the table arrangements completely from memory.
The wedding itself went well. Still, the process gave me an appreciation for the common gripes about how simply planning a wedding can be a test for the partnership, as well as the challenges that couples may face in making something that is theirs. Even when both partners are truly engaged and committed to the process, it’s a challenge to create a framework that keeps both of you in the loop, and it probably isn’t going to be perfect. But, I suppose that’s what marriage is, a continuously evolving, forever imperfect, forever improving gestalt of two hearts, two conversations, and two different checklists that are probably in a different order from each other, and that’s okay.
…And, you know what? I have to admit that I probably am One of Those People, and I do kind of wish that I setup a Slack team. We could’ve probably used more emojis and animated GIFs in that final prep month.
How did you plan things with your partner? What do you still use for keeping each other sane and on the same page before, during, and after the wedding? Is it better when you take turns being the active decision maker or are there just certain decisions that are better for one of you to make than the other?
