Is plan a wedding.
As wedding season is rapidly approaching all my newly engaged friends are planning weddings and getting married. The hype of wedding season is in full swing! Don't get me wrong, I love weddings, and I loved my wedding, I just don't want anything to do with the actual planning part. Just the show up, fun, cake-eating, dancing, and being in love part. Not that I really "planned" mine in the first place, but still. I really can't think of anything more stressful to do. On a scale of fun it ranked somewhere around...oh I don't know...slowly pulling my eyelashes off one by one. I'm sure there has to be another girl out there in the world who didn't find anything appealing about wedding planning. Are you out there?!?!
Anyway Evan proposed at the end of March 2010. We didn't really know when we could get married. Being in the Army it makes things a lot more complicated and well...stupid. So for a few months I tried in vain to plan a wedding. At first I was pumped, I mean wedding planning is what every girl DREAMS about! We all know the running joke of girls having their "Pinterest Wedding" board filled before they even have a boyfriend. I had thought about getting married and planning a wedding for so long that it seemed easy. It seemed easy to choose centerpieces, dresses, and flowers on Pinterest or Etsy, but when it comes down to choosing the things for your actual wedding day -- that's when it gets tough. I quickly realized that 90% of the stuff they say you should care about -- I didn't.
Should the center pieces have roses or lilies? Should the bridesmaids wear heels or flats? Should Grandpa Joe sit with Aunt Betty or at Cousin Fred's table? Questions like this drove me up a wall. Do people really care about this kind of stuff? I wondered in disbelief. I kept wanting to scream "I don't care! Some else can pick!" But when it's your wedding, you have to care, and nobody wants to pick for you. 2 months of hypothetical planning later, I was done with this wedding nonsense. I was stressed out, overwhelmed, and withering on the ground licking my wedding wounds. I felt defeated. Millions of girls had planned a wedding, and had fun doing it! Why didn't I feel that way?
It boiled down to only a handful of things I cared about:
I wanted to be married in a church.
I wanted a dress.
I wanted a cake.
I wanted Evan there. (Kinda important)
That's it.
I broke down. I told my mom I'd be in Mexico, if you want to see me get married, buy a plane ticket. Needless to say she wasn't exactly thrilled. Luckily, things worked out a lot differently than any of us had planned. On a random Wednesday afternoon in June we decided to get married. No big deal, right? I might want to add that we also decided to get married that Saturday...as in 3 days later. I called my mom and innocently asked her if she had any plans on Saturday. Then I dropped the bomb and told her our scheme. She called me back several times asking if I was serious. After the initial shock, both of our families were on board with making this wedding happen. I told my mom to take the reins, and make the decisions, I trusted that she would make it awesome! (Just and FYI: My mom has excellent taste...think Martha Stewart on crack...not hard to picture) Before we knew it, we had a wedding ready for Saturday. I can't gush enough about how perfect it was, but it really was! There were a lot things that we went without, but what we had were the important things.
If you don't want a big wedding, don't have one. If you don't want a white dress, have a pink one, If you don't want your annoying aunt there, invite her anyway. It's not worth creating hard feelings. If you want to go to the court house to tie the knot, track down the judge. Can't afford flaming desserts? Have a bonfire and roast marshmallows instead. Make your wedding yours, even if that means doing things a little differently.
The American dream of marriage has just become another excuse for a party or who can put on the best show. Marriage isn't something special anymore. Kim Kardashian got married as a publicity stunt to make money for goodness sake! How much more can you degrade marriage into a three ring circus? Society has peer pressured us into being more concerned about having the best of everything for our wedding day, because after all it's our one day! Rather than remembering it's more about the two people committing themselves to each other, fancy clothes or not. Whether you spent $2,000 or 200,000 in the end, the outcome will be the same: You're married. Nobody will remember what color of table cloths you had, flowers will be wilted and thrown away, the food will be eaten, the monogrammed napkins will be crumpled up, and your wedding dress will be hung in the back of a dark closet. (The next time you'll probably even look at your dress will be years later. You'll be brushing the dust off of it, as your daughter looks at you with horror about how ugly and ancient it looks.) So people, please save your money to pay off student loans, have it for a down payment on a house, or go on a once-in-a-lifetime honeymoon. Make your wedding special, have nice things, but don't lose sight of what a wedding is really about. Surround yourself with people who love you, make your vows special, and never ever let something as special as your wedding day become a money-pit pageant.
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