Wedding Graduate: An Update From The Groom

Last week we ran one of the only wedding graduate posts ever written by a groom, and you guys loved it. You demanded more, and Harrison, the groom in question, was only too happy to comply (he complained that the post I ran last week was merely his email introduction to the topic, and not anywhere near informative and practical enough.) I’m sure you won’t be at all surprised that his best wedding advice is A) Practical, B) Short and to the point, and C) Really helpful if you actually attempt to follow it. As a child of a mathematician, I have to say, this is probably the wedding advice my father would give, and he’d probably also be correct. So enjoy (and listen).

So, I’m an engineer, and a guy. My first inclination, when deciding what advice to pass on, was to make a list of failure-modes, and logistical approaches. I now believe that I can do significantly better, with fewer words. Elizabeth and I work well together — we complement each others’ strengths and weaknesses. If I were to give one piece of advice, it might be to treat the wedding as you would a project at work. Nothing involved in the process anywhere is a life-and-death decision. If you can’t afford something, you find a way around, or you do without.

Every now and then, you’ll have to make a decision…not about which caterer to use, whose car to drive, or how many rolls of paper towels are going to be required, but about what you WANT. When it comes time to make that decision, you’ll want to have your sanity intact. Obsessing over irrelevant details will deplete mental and emotional energy that will be needed for the fun choices.

So put together a rough-draft. Develop an intuition for what problems can be solved later. Make use of pessimal estimates, and find base-line solutions that can work. If you have time, later on, to improve upon things: great. If you don’t have time, you already have a functional, if untidy, solution. When you find yourself enumerating dozens of possible outcomes because you simply don’t have enough information yet, go do some Pa Qua, meditate, fly a kite, or go for a run…You have plenty of time for deciding whether you want the basket with the programs to be ignored with a blue ribbon or yellow.

And, for good measure, the dancer density expectation values.

Photos By: Emily Takes Photos

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