I’ve learned a lot about wedding planning over the last year and I’ve concluded that I, the groom, am only playing a small role in the wedding day itself.
I’ve assembled this handy pie graph to illustrate my point:
51% Bride
Almost everyone agrees that the wedding day is about the bride: looking hot, being a rock star, sticking it to frienemies, these are all the hallmarks of a bride’s wedding day. While I concede that the bride is the majority stakeholder, there are other factors at play.
38% Parents
Parents also have a major stake in the wedding day. For them, it’s a chance for them to recuperate gift value from all the weddings and showers they were forced to go to throughout their entire lives.
Banquet hall space is scarce and may limit the number of guests that can attend a reception. While there are many friends I would like to include on the guest list, they will be playing second fiddle to my parents’ wishes of inviting their co-workers, former co-workers, long lost acquaintances, random strangers they just met on the street, and other assorted people I’ve never met before and will likely never meet again. Sorry, many of my old friends from college and high school, no soup for you.
But, the parents are paying for most of the wedding so I better just zip it. Weddings ain’t cheap.
10% Creating Exciting Pinterest Photo-Ops
Remember a few months ago when I started raving about this Pinterest website? Like it was the greatest website ever made because of the great meal recipes, and the cute cat pics, and whatnot?
I was wrong. Good God, was I ever wrong.
Pinterest stinks. It has made wedding planning tremendously difficult. Everything in a wedding nowadays has to be super creative and you can’t get around it. There is no such thing as an easy decision and the long time frame for planning a wedding only gives you more time to second guess yourself. At least the website is getting blocked now at most peoples’ place of work. Smart move, Corporations.
1% Celebrating Two Kindred Spirits Becoming One and Sharing the Rest of Their Lives Together
If you’re lucky. There’s a good chance this 1% sliver might get eaten by the Pinterest factor stated above.
The silver lining to all this is that there is a precisely 0% chance that I am backing out this wedding (or marriage for that matter) because I don’t ever want to go through this again. Jess could quit her job, let herself go, eat Funyons all day and have constant Funyon breath, start collecting dirty pennies, forbid me to listen to Call on Me, become a crappy volleyball player, insist I buy her hallmark greeting cards for every minor milestone, and generally hurl insults at me all day and I would take it in stride.
Hell, she could become a Minnesota Viking fan. I’m sticking around forever.
You know, I probably shouldn’t have let Jess know this. This information does NOT give me a lot of leverage in the future. I would prefer that Jess keep her Funyon breath to a minimum. At least she doesn’t like cool ranch Doritos.
Ok, I'm done venting now. I may be venting again soon though, this weekend I'm in charge of attaching ribbon bows to 200 invitations. It took me over 5 minutes to do the sample one, which I was not able to complete satisfactorily. That puts my estimated time of completion between 1000 minutes and infinity.
