I Would Like to Be A Conformist Lemming, Please!

[ladysprite]

I love my fiance with a deep and abiding passion. I love my friends and family, and I love the fact that I'm getting married. I love my pretty wedding gown, and the ceremony writing is actually starting to fall into place, and the chance to celebrate with several dozen of my nearest and dearest is just marvelous.

That said, this entire wedding rigmarole is starting to annoy the bejeezus out of me. Here is an entire industry bent upon making you realize that you're broke, worthless, and all of your friends will hate you forever if you can't afford an open bar and a rehearsal dinner at La Expensiva.

I honestly wish I had a small fortune to fund this one day of my life. I wish I could afford to feed everyone I've ever met bottomless booze and lobster risotto and an entire raw cow apiece, with live music and free pony rides. Or, barring that, I wish I was cool enough and talented enough to just find an empty hall somewhere and sew my own dress and grow my own flowers and bake my own cake and weave tiny handmade baskets and fill them with tiny homemade chocolates for all my guests. But I'm not that rich, and I'm not that talented, and so I'm stuck with a wedding that is going to scream 'frugal' to everyone I know who was lucky enough to have family with money. And it just makes it worse every time my mother cries because she's going to have to live with her daughter having a wedding that's "good enough" instead of Storybook Perfect, because she keeps insisting that it's her fault for being a bad mother and refusing to believe me when I say that I'm happy with chicken for dinner and bagels for the rehearsal breakfast, which makes me feel like I'm a cheap bitch for being happy with that.

Stupid wedding. Stupid social pressure. Stupid inferiority complex. Stupid student loans and stupid low-paying job. Blah.

Comments

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

I want that you and umbran should be happy together—that you help each other over the hard spots in life, enjoy much of life together, and that your debates are verbal masterpieces that Jerry Seinfeld wish he had written. Well, okay, maybe not the last one, but you get the idea.

I make no wishes about your wedding other than that you attend it, that you have plenty of people who love you both there to share it and wish you well with ideas that overlap substantially with mine (except the Seinfeld-scripted discussion part). As Miss Manners (Judith Martin) put it, if your wedding day is the happiest day of your life, the marriage is all downhill from there. Good, yes. My siblings' and my weddings ranged from the backyard affair (two of us) to the large party style (two of us) to the smallish elegance that my mother-in-law arranged from Elizabeth and me. The police even shut down my sister and brother-in-law's reception party (too much noise). We're all still married. Hmmph. Both sets of grandparents stayed married all their lives, even though my paternal grandmother spent so much on his wedding reception that he and my grandmother had to get to their new home on the subway. So there's no correlation between wedding sizes and styles and marriages, I think. But you know that, and we all know that you know that.

Oh, and the rant is perfectly understandable. Yes, I know it's just darned frustrating and you're sheepish that you even have it as a fantasy and... and you're not even up to one smidgen of the nuttiness that I've seen some friends go through for wedding planning. Are you making your victims best friends buy incredibly offensive taffeta gowns that they'll never wear again? Are you ordering people about because it's "your day"? Are you using a wedding as guest extortion? No, I didn't think so. You're nice. Your fiance's nice. Your mother's nice. His family's nice. By the power invested in me as an lj friend, you're hereby absolved of minor irrationalities connected with the wedding. Pfft!