Wedding Colors and Other Premarital Tortures

Weddings are curious creatures. Getting married is like buying an all inclusive 4 star trip for two to paradise for $200, and then reading in the fine print that the airplane and hotel have “some assembly required”. But not to worry, just like building a plane or hotel, there are plenty of people you can hire to do the work for you. Here are some of the most popular wedding planning techniques:

1. Go crazy doing everything yourself so that you know it’s exactly what you want.
2. Go crazy micromanaging everything and paying an assload so that everything is exactly what you want.
3. Pay someone else an assload to handle everything, and then go crazy because you have no control over the one day that is supposed to be all about you.

The endless decisions involved in a wedding range from your most basic to things you never expected to have to think about. The first and most basic decisions are of course: when, where, and who? And this is where the happy couple gets their first clue that the day is not actually about them. Usually the date is where you start, because of course, the second the ring is on the finger people can’t think of anything to start a conversation other than, “So when’s the wedding?” And you damn well better have at least a rough estimate, at very least a season and a year. This of course leads you right to question number two, where’s it going to be? Because the time and the place can easily cancel each other out. Once you have the place, or at least the idea of the place, you have to think about who will realistically be able to make it there. Obviously, not everyone will be able to make it to your Valentine’s Day wedding in Venezuela. So you figure out who you want there, where the most likely spot is that the most people would come to, and when it’s available. If you can get those three, you’re rolling. You book the rooms (that’s right, rooms, don’t forget the reception) and start sending out “save the date” notices.

I swear that “save the date” cards did not exist when I was growing up. Either that, or my parents weren’t very popular wedding guests. But this seems like another unnessary product the overblown wedding industry. Plus, save the date and invitations seem like perfect “go green” candidates for slashing and burning.

*Snack for Thought – What the world would be like without Hallmark. Would we lose confidence in our ability to get married, or have babies because we wouldn’t know which products to buy for the occasion? Grade school teachers unable to plan a curriculum, soccer moms everywhere in therapy trying to deal with their lost sense of purpose and direction?

Save the date notices are where it all starts, they are the rough draft for the invitation. But this is when you need to think of the concept. What will your theme be, and yes, what will your colors be? Like you’re own personal prom. Will you be floating in on sunset lit clouds? Possible a beach in the Caribbean? A swank Manhattan shindig a la 1920s? Or a swinging New Orleans Mardi Gras fest? These are the pressing decisions that will rule your life for the forseeable future. And once you’ve decided you can’t change your mind.

Overwhelming? Not to worry. You have friends and family to help you out, or more accurately, to tell you why each of your brilliant ideas simply won’t work, and to constantly push for their own fantastic plans. “I think the bridesmaids should all wear hot pink stripes!” (Ah, but only the 90lb bridesmaid making that suggestion would be able to pull it off, as if she needed yet another thing to make her look better than the others to begin with). “Wouldn’t it be great to have the wedding on Cousin Jake’s farm in VA?” (Not really as neither the bride, groom, any of their friends, and anyone other than cousin Jake live near VA).

Well darling, I’m trying to help, but if you don’t want me involved, that’s fine. I don’t even have to come to the wedding.” Ahhh…passive aggression, a delicate art perfected by mothers everwhere.

I’m convinced that the real benefit of wedding planning is to give the couple a real idea of what it might be like to be married. The planning not only gives them every opportunity to fight with each other, but just about everyone they know as well. Some couples deal with this by one of the two simply letting the other make all the plans and removing themselves from the chaos. Probably a good indicator of what will happen if the marriage gets difficult too.

Across history, love and compatibility haven’t necessarily been reigning champions for reasons people get married. People used to recognize and accept that marriage was more of a business deal than an act of love. Love might have come later as a result of a good working relationship with your marriage partner, but that was not a guarantee with the contract. The difference today, is couples are all about the compatibility part, but have forgotten about the work part. Perhaps it doesn’t matter that you wake up every day and look at your partner and get excited. Maybe you just need to wake up every day and never question whether you should bail out. But when you’re looking at your shiny new engagement ring, you’re not thinking about any of that, you’re not thinking about marriage, you’re thinking about a wedding.

I said before that a wedding is a curious thing, but let me revise; a wedding is a dangerous thing. It is the bright and shiny facade to distract our attention from the real decision. How can anyone consider marriage when there are so many life or death decisions to be made about which shoes to wear, whether or not to order the beef and the salmon, and how far to take in the dress based on how well the diet is going.

I’ll conclude with the two bits of advice I give to any of my friends facing a wedding.

1 – No matter what happens, even if absolutely everything goes wrong, you will still be married and it will all be over in the morning.

2 – Elope.