As observers of my life already know, I'm getting married in about 14 months. I'm typically private about these sorts of things, but I wanted to share a few thoughts I've had about the process. This is mainly for other dudes, no question; however, to the extent my fiancee doesn't kill me for sharing details, hopefully I can keep someone out there from being a stupid freaking idiot about the whole thing.
My first thought is that, while generally awesome, weddings have been spoiled by the same ultra-consumeristic bullshit that continuously pollutes our society. My future wife and I both agree that we want our wedding to be a kick-ass party; unpretentious, free-wheeling, occasionally random and the kind of overall environment where no one has to think twice about having legal (or semi-legal, or illegal-as-long-as-nobody-gets-caught) fun. We also feel like that kind of party does not have to put us into a lifetime of debt to happen. Lots of people that we know agree with this point of view, and good for them, because they're right. But a sucker gets married every minute, to paraphrase the great P.T. Barnum, and a significant minority of folks seem to think that the same principles that apply to their lives apply to their weddings - the gluttonous spending of money.
Now, I'll admit that compared with the average American, I have a very odd relationship with money. I track my spending religiously, I budget so that I can never spend more than I earn, and I'm damn near evangelical about saving being the key to eventual freedom from stuff like having a mortgage, having to go to work, and basically all the stuff that prevents me from spending all day smoking Cuban cigars which I will light with $10 bills. (NOTE: I wouldn't be supporting the Cuban economy; I'd be burning their fields.)
So I suppose I'm being a pretentious asshole by saying that, when it comes to wedding planning, it makes the most perfect kind of sense to not get wrapped up in all that, "But it's a once-in-a-lifetime event, and it's only seven thousand dollars for these incredible, Buddhist monk-created organic pottery centerpieces, and it's my fairytale, magical day!" bullshit.
Oh well, I'm a pretentious asshole. I'm also speaking common sense, and it's unbelievable how rare common sense is in the whole process.
I was watching the (mostly unfunny) humorist Dave Barry on MSNBC's great morning show "Morning Joe" a few months ago, and he mentioned something very funny (surprisingly) about paying for his daughter's wedding - it's like the whole system is designed to tell brides-to-be that their wedding doesn't have to be super-expensive, but if it isn't super-expensive, it'll suck. Thankfully, my fiancee hasn't bought into all that crap yet... but there's still 14 months to go. (I kid.)
My second point: it's amazing the extent to which the cottage industry completely dedicated to the wedding process exists these days. You wouldn't think that America is still in the relatively early stages of recovering from a terrible economic recession - hell, a near-financial meltdown - by reading Brides, the magazine that my fiancee receives each month, which is chock-filled with novel wedding planning advice (like the newest $20,000 dresses!).
In my life, I have the tendency to paraphrase common colloquialisms to prove my points. One of my recent favorites (which no one seems to understand) is: "Weddings are like assholes; everyone has one." What I'm trying, and failing, to say with this very profane comment is that creating a magazine (for instance) that caters to new brides strikes me as a very difficult thing to do.
By analogy, I subscribe to Esquire. By subscribing to Esquire, I'm telling the publisher of the magazine that I am the type of person who reads the magazine. By this, I mean that I am probably aged 25-54, college-educated, and have political views which lean to the left. I earn at or above the median United States income, and I'm at least willing to consider purchasing luxury items and new fashion styles. I care deeply about current events and politics, I enjoy postmodern writing, and I'm not against reading stuff that makes me emotional.
By comparison, the target demographic of Brides is the following: a woman who is getting married.
Lots of women get married, smart or stupid, old or young, rich or poor, conservative or liberal, backwoods-y or cosmopolitan, suburban yuppies and ex-convicts. Yes, that's right, weddings are like assholes - almost everybody has one. So, given the demographic wasteland that the magazine has to cater to, what the hell do you actually write in a magazine like this? How the hell does it make any sort of sense?
Now, I would know the answer to this query if I ever actually read the magazine. I'm just not certain that it's a manly thing to do, however, so I decided to run into the living room and ask the woman who does read it.
Me: "Hey, what do you get out of that Brides magazine?"
April (my fiancee): "What the hell do you mean?"
Me: "Like, if you were to tell me the one thing that reading the magazine does for you, what would it be?"
April: "Oh, I get lots of ideas from reading it. [pause] Why are you asking me this?"
Me: "I'm writing a blog post summarizing all the things that have been annoying me about the wedding planning process, and I just realized that Brides magazine doesn't really have any content at all. You confirmed it for me. It's like the perfect postmodern magazine; it's like Playboy. Nobody reads Playboy for the articles."
April: "Well, it's not like I only read it for the pictures; there are lots of hints about things like cool wedding favors and stuff like that. But in general, it's not about content for me, it's about helping me plan."
Which leads me pretty well, I think, into my third point, which is that the system works remarkably well for people who are discerning enough to know what is BS and what isn't, when it comes to planning a wedding. I'm beginning to realize that even if we adopt a very strict Keep It Simple, Stupid-type approach to wedding planning, there are still about 404* things to plan in advance of the big day. (*NOTE: This is if you believe the standard checklist from TheKnot.com, which seems to believe that every couple intends to have a $100,000, multi-cultural, multi-religious, three-day wedding celebration. I think we come in at about 150 items, given our conservative approach.)
To digress a little, my personal opinion is that, compared with men, most women are fundamentally decent enough not to care about whether their popular culture speaks directly to them. This is the charitable way to describe womenfolk's fascination not only with Brides, but also with Cosmopolitan, a magazine I actually have bothered to read and find so ridiculously stupid/vapid that it leads me to the uncharitable way to describe it - that what Internet porn is for dudes, Cosmopolitan damned near has to be for some women: that is, an escape fantasy into a world of complete smoothness and lack of social hang-ups.
But to get back to wedding planning: there's something to be said for loving your day-to-day life so very much that you don't need "special" things (or that you only need them when they're financially reasonable to undertake). I am personally so proud of the fact that my fiancee loves me, our present life together, and the idea of spending the rest of our lives together, so very much that we don't need to spend through the teeth just to please a rich uncle or three. I can't help but think that those who choose to do so, do so in order to compensate for something that is lacking - either in their relationship per se, or in their relationships with their families, or in their day-to-day life. Not to be an asshole (OK, to be kind of an asshole), I've got 99 problems but that ain't one.
My perfect vision is hopefully a downright normal one. (I've spoken about it with my fiancee, and she agrees it's pretty cool.) It's a vision of me with my new wife and friends, playing "Rock Band" in a hotel suite at 1 AM, tuxedo undone, drinking an ice-cold beer from the bottle during our after-party. But that's just my plain and simple view of the world, and to get others to agree with it would be just plain evil. Even if I am right.
