So in case you haven’t heard (which would be tough, because we’ve been all up in your social media faces about it) at the end of May the boyfriend and I got engaged. Which, thanks to the kindness of our friends, made for a bunch of congratulatory texts, calls and emails, making us feel incredibly lucky as well as very smug and accomplished for no reason.
Yet, all this love and support heading my way came with very specific undertones of “Wait WHATTTTTT?!” and, “Whoa…I can’t believe you said yes.”
And this is not because I don’t entirely dig my boyfriend. I’ve been calling my life partner since that first time he oh-so gently and romantically prevented me from diving into a dark lake while high on mushrooms.
He is the best of dudes and patiently accepts me in all of my crazy, and I in turn accept him in all of the conversations about how annoying his hair is today.
But marriage? Nah, it was never really for me.
Call it an extension of my overall paralyzing fear of routine, being the center of attention AND titles, but I had always just envisioned a very casual spending of life together. In my version of our future, we’d just wake up one day, roll over, be like, “Ok so we’re in this for good?” Seal in with a high-five and go back to sleep.
But then I went and fell in love with Daniel friggin’ Lynch.
Dan is the only guy you will ever meet who when told, “Actually, you know what, I don’t particularly need a $10,000 ring or $70,000 wedding” didn’t immediately stand up and start spinning about in a slow motion twirl to the song What a Wonderful World.
Nope. Instead he said, “Aww really, but why not?”
But hey, I’ll give it to him: – for a chick who prides herself of being pretty self-aware, I don’t actually know myself THAT well.
Fact is, when it comes down to it, this whole engagement thing hasn’t sucked.
Everything I thought would be the worst, most self-induced torturous experiences in this whole wedding planning thing have been some of the most fun.
And because it’s been a whopping 4 months and I’m basically a wedding expert now (kidding, I’m always about 30 seconds away from passing out from the pressure of it all), here I present you with Emma Gillies’ Wedding Planning Pros and Cons.
PRO: You get to do whatever you want.
CON: People don’t like that.
Here’s what I learned REAL quick. If you step even a little outside the carefully mapped-out, “Everyone’s Guide to Weddings” people assume you’re going to have a gothic themed day, sacrifice baby lambs as an appetizer, then rock out some vows and seal your marriage with the tears of orphaned children.
When all this engagement stuff went down and we decided to actually do this, my one stipulation was that we did it our way **AKA my way** AKA an informally structured night heavy on the booze and light on all the other mumbo-jumbo.
When people heard that however, suddenly I started getting questions like, “Are you wearing a dress?” and, “What colour will you be wearing” and,“Will there be keg stands and red solo cups?” and, “Is the venue someone’s garage?”
As if just by the very nature of trying to go a little off-script we were essentially lighting the entire wedding industry on fire and cackling evilly as it burned at our non-conformist feet.
We might as well have been planning to make our wedding a giant middle finger to all the other weddings that came before. I would wear a black pantsuit; we would release doves and then tenderly shoot them and their accompanying symbolism from the air with BB guns. Stare at the aghast, horrified faces of our friends and family and scream “Welcome to our celebration of love bitches!!”
Just a little FYI: no animals will be harmed in the making of our wedding, I’ll probably wear white, it will be in dress form, keg stands are a no but I assume at some point there will be a pink flamingo beer-funnel, and the only thing we plan on sacrificing is a tiny bit of everyone’s soul and pride via an 8-hour open bar.
PRO: You get to have a vision.
CON: You have to have a vision.
Related to the point above, a ton of wedding decision making depends on people have some predetermined “vision” of their perfect day that they would like to see come to fruition.
I had no such vision, and Dan even less so. The first time someone asked us (our photographer) I froze and panicked knowing she wanted to hear something like “city rustic” or “hipster glam” and all I could come up with is, “Uhhh… a party for our friends that we happen to get married at?”
This will of course be little help to me when it comes to trying to figure out what shade of peony looks best against a brick background. Regardless, it stuck. Now we go forth making all decisions based on a carefully balanced scale of “Will this increase or decrease the amount of fun had?”
PRO: You get to try on fancy dresses.
CON: None; go do this now.
I had assumed wedding dress shopping would leave me lying in the fetal position delicately clutching a pile and lace and tulle, regretting every carb ever consumed and swearing off the colour white for the rest of time.
However, what I failed to comprehend is that weddings- and especially women’s dresses- are a carefully contrived, booming fucking mega-industry and that all these dresses are manufactured specifically to make women feel like goddamn beautiful angels.
I might as well have been dressed by singing Disney forest animals who draped me in combinations of white lace and silk blessed by Tibetan monks for now nice everything looked. We’re talking about ALL the things being nipped and tucked into the right places.
It’s bonkers, and a ton of fun.
I highly recommend it to anyone, regardless of current relationship status. Having a bad Tuesday? Try on a wedding dress. Getting over a head cold? Pretty dresses are the cure. Didn’t like your latte this morning? Satin and Chiffon will help.
PRO: Pinterest is basically the answer to everything.
CON: I actually just typed the above sentence.
I don’t actually know how the world operated before Google. And I definitely don’t know how people planned parties before other way more talented people planned parties and posted pictures of them for you to completely rip-off.
Here are types of things I’ve Googled since May.
- How do you make a mason jar look rustic?
- How do you make a tablecloth look rustic?
- How do you make a future husband look rustic?
- How do you host a barn wedding but like, in downtown Toronto?
- Are sumo wrestler suits an appropriate wedding activity?
- What wedding dress styles make your arms look skinny?
- What engagement photo poses make your arms look skinny?
- Should I just workout my arms once and awhile?
- Is it possible to have a bridal shower that doesn’t make people want to die a slow death?
- Are there wedding DJ’s that aren’t overall terrible human beings?
- Quotes about love and Whiskey
- What are the best kind of whiskey shots?
- What do you do if your boyfriend loves whiskey more than he loves you?
PRO: People expect you to use the word fiancée.
CON: This is an awful word that makes even the best of people sound like idiots. Let’s eradicate it from the human language.
I feel like this word was designed simply to set people in relationships apart from other people in relationships. What a strange, nonsensical divide.
There is no way of pronouncing this word that doesn’t make you sound like an asshole.
Please stop it now.
PRO: People will suddenly become very interested in that one part of your life and ask you a ton of questions about it.
CON: If you’re anything like me, you won’t have an answer to a single one of them.
Life is so weird man. Sometimes I think that if I laid all my pivotal life decision down like a series of dots every single one has been immediately followed by people asking, “Ok but what’s next?”
There’s no stopping it.
When you’re single everyone asks when you’re going to settle down. Find a partner and it’s when’s the engagement? The wedding? The babies?
Figure out one thing, what’s the next thing? You’re ok now, but you could be better and further along and more more MORE!.
When we got engaged I naively thought, “Boo yah! No one saw this coming, this will quiet down the masses for a second.” But then immediately it was “Have you booked a venue? When are you trying on dresses? WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T WANT AN ENGAGEMENT RING?”
Instead of taking a breath and just asking each other how life is right at this very moment, we’re all stuck chasing a future that for no reason is always deemed brighter and shinier and better than the present.
Everyone thinks I’m wholly naïve to think that I can bang out 90% of this wedding in the three months immediately preceding it, but here’s my rationale:
The hard part is over.
I found him.
We don’t all fight and cry our way through the relationships in our 20s in the pursuit of one day, or one party.
We do it so we can grow into someone worth spending life with. And then we go out and try to find someone worth spending life with.
It’s all so that one day someone will look at us and be like, “Hey, I like hanging out with you, would you like to hang out forever?”
The flowers and the dress and all those thousands of other small decisions will come. But I don’t want to spend so much time making those decisions that I miss the next year buried in piles of font and twine choices.
I’ll probably have a month’s worth of sleepless nights over appropriate tablecloth shades and string light bulb wattage. But 30 days is better than 365.
So maybe I’m inexperienced, and yes, maybe a little out of my league with all this planning but I do know this: When it’s all over, all I’ll remember is the people in the room and the person standing beside me.
Which brings me to the ultimate PRO: It’s your one excuse to get all the people you adore most in one space for one giant, ridiculous, intoxicated night of fun and horrendous dance moves. That’s what sold me on this whole wedding thing.
Plus, it’s life after the party that I’m pretty pumped for.
E.
Vodka taught me how to dance 