Deadline: Wedding Day

I just got a quick little thought that has been playing around in my head about the wedding date that is zooming closer and closer (a little over two months!?!? AH!)

I used to feel like the wedding was a big deadline. Like, forget all the actual wedding stuff. I saw the wedding as a deadline for me to become awesome. To become the full version of myself. To be the strong individual I was intended to be. Or whatever. For some reason I thought this all had to happen by the time I got married.

I think its because of the idea that you shouldn't be with someone until you know yourself first. Which I think can be true and is good advice - definitely know yourself first because it makes knowing someone else intimately and them knowing you intimately so much easier! But life doesn't really work like that all the time.

I met my future husband when I was 18 and he was 22. wowza, huh? almost six years later (can you do math and figure out how old I am? I hope you can!) we are getting married. Now, do I wish we had met when I was just a wee bit older? yes. I totally could have used some more growing up time on my own. There is only so much developing you can do by 18. But we met when we did and can't change that. And I definitely knew he was a good catch and did not want to pass up on such a great guy.

So we've had a long relationship with me growing up a lot (both of us growing up a lot, really) within this relationship. That is going to happen regardless. Relationships make you grow up and grow together. I just happened to have lots more growing up to do since I was just a wee little one when we met!

Anyway. Whatever gave me this idea that I had to be my all-star self before getting married? Whatever gave me the idea that I could reach my all-star self so early at all? I dunno. But I've definitely learned that I am going to be growing up for a long, long time. Until I'm dead, in fact. So this wedding deadline that I had in my head is silly.

More than that, I've learned that this other person I've chosen, he helps me grow in ways that I never could grow on my own. He challenges me and makes me confront aspects of myself that sometimes I would rather not. Plus, I like the challenge of trying to grow as my own individual person while at the same time growing as a couple. :)

The wedding date has started to look less and less like a deadline and more and more like a kicking off point of a new joint partnership that will bring both of us higher.

And I can't wait!

Ushy Gushy (or lack there of)

I was reading Another Damn Wedding's post on music and cheesy love songs today (totally agree, Lyn!) and it reminded me (in a back asswards kind of way) of a post I wanted to write. So here goes, kiddos. Beware of tangents and blabbering!

I just recently finished reading Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert and I would love to do a full book review of that, but I just don't know how. She brought up so many great issues that I fear I'd babble on and on and on and couldn't stop. Also, I flew through that book! So I'd like to read it again and process it a bit more before trying to put together something meaningful to say.

But I do want to touch on one topic: love. (yeah, ok, just the biggest topic EVER!)

Gilbert pretty much says that love is a horrible reason to get married and I am going to go ahead and agree with her. Love is flimsy. Love is changing. Love is an emotion held in a human heart - not the most stable of carriers. In fact, one of the most unstable carriers. Love offers no security, no guarantee. Love is indeed blind.

But I think Gilbert, in this instance, is talking about love in the sense of romantic love. The love that washes over us when we first meet someone, when they fill our brain and consume our thoughts. That love is not stable and can come a go, leaving a broken marriage behind. That kind of love is dangerous to marry for.

Gilbert tells the story of an elderly couple who lived by her while she was growing up. They were married for years and years. In her old age, the lady had alzheimer's and her husband took care of her. He did things that she used to enjoy, trying to provide whatever happiness he could to her now.

Talking to the old man one day, Gilbert asks him how he and his wife fell in love. But to her surprise that’s not how their story went. He was young and trying to start up his own farm. Someone gave him advice, saying that he must have a good wife to build a successful farm. So he choose a bride and they got married.

No love in the beginning of that marriage, but what love evident in the end while he cared for his wife. The moral of that story: love does not a good marriage make, but a good marriage fosters love.

That’s where my head is at right now. Love. What loves means, what love should provide for a marriage, and the different kinds of love. As Helen Fisher, a scientist of love, tells (check out an awesomely interesting 30 minute TED talk by her), there are three kinds of love.

1) Lust
2) Romantic love
3) Attachment

Lust is that basic desire that Fisher describes as evolving to get us out there looking for potential mates. Romantic love is that obsession, that craving to be with someone that Fisher describes as evolving to focus our mating energy. Finally, attachment is that sense of calm and security with your partner that she describes as evolving to “allow you to tolerate another person long enough to raise a child.”

We praise romantic love and that ushy gushy crazy kind of love, but leave out the less glitzy phase of ‘attachment’. (maybe it just needs a new name...how unattractive sounding…) But that's what marriage is. And the mister and I are there. We've been together long enough (5.5+ years) to get past that romantic love stage and into the nitty gritty how-do-we-stand-each-other phase of working out the details. How do we manage money? How do we maintain that spark of romantic love? How do we deal with each other's family? Do our long and short term goals align? How do we make them align? and so on and so forth.

And this is how Lyn's post at Another Damn Wedding got me thinking (see, back asswards). We are not an ushy gushy couple. We don't really like ushy gushy songs. But that's what everyone expects. The honesty of where we are at in our relationship doesn't really sound so good in a song! I'm thinking lyrics along the line of "Merging our accounts and taking on your debt! Fighting over space in our one tiny closet!" Not so great. So how do we choose music for those important and 'significant' moments - like a first dance?

Or how do we write vows? Whenever I start them in my head, it always sounds like such a downer. Because when I think about our marriage honestly, I'm scared. And to get over those nerves, I have to think honestly about the trouble we will face and about why I'm willing to face that trouble with him. Thats what it really comes down to, but again, doesn't really sound the best. "Baby, shits gonna hit the fan, but I want you to be there with me when it does! And darn if we won't clean up that mess together!"

Pass Nana a hankie, folks, cuz this ones a tear jerker!

We will proceed carefully and take time to pick music and write a ceremony fitting for us. It will be romantic in some senses and I'm sure we will jerk a few tears, but I'm guessing that our vibe will be less of an ushy gushy ridiculous love fest and more of a happy, honest, thoughtful ridiculous love fest.

Cheers, all! Hope this made some sort of sense. Next time I'll pick a topic a little less large than 'love'! ;)

xoxo,
Jen

Photo via adwriter

Categories

I was reading Angie's post over at One Cat Per Person today and got to thinking about categories. About how we need them, love to put everything we can in them, and how hard they are to ignore. For wedding planning there seems to be the indie camp and the traditional camp. Two categories of weddings that wage an "Us" vs "Them" war.

But what about the in betweens?

Some days I feel like people are going to look at our wedding and go "WTF!? They call this a wedding!?" because we are skipping a lot of tradition and sometimes even subverting it. Then the next day I may be feeling like, "Holy crap, our wedding is so WEDDINGish! WTF happened? I thought we were going to be unique and special and have a wedding that is totally us!? OMG!" *spaz spaz*

First of all, if I were to describe us as a couple...I would not use the word indie OR the word traditional. We are somewhere in between. So our wedding is going to be us and be somewhere in between.

But like I said, we all love to put things in categorizes to help us better understand them. To give them a framework so we can say, ok, I see what is going on.

When planning our limited decor with my mom and my aunts, they kept trying to put a 'theme' or category to it. I'd say how I liked birds and saw this cute little bird that I wanted to hide in the branches of our centerpiece and suddenly they were off planning a bird themed wedding! Our wedding is involving trees in a few ways and is going to be kinda low key, so at one point they decided this meant it was an eco-garden party! Off they went, super excited about all the garden or bird theme items we could include.

They really, really seemed to want a cohesive 'theme' or category to be able to decorate by- something easily identifiable. So I had to keep reigning them in and explaining that no theme (besides my declared theme of "happy") was going to be happening. It was just going to be a mix and mash of pretty things that generally go together. Colors, fun poof balls, maybe some lanterns, some tree pieces worked in....but nothing really easily identifiable.

Now, I'm kinda pointing my fingers at my poor mom and aunties about their need to categorize, but its me too. In some aspects we are having a "eff it" wedding and in some we are having a traditional wedding. And I need to get over trying to fit our wedding anywhere. But that's a hard natural urge to get over - the desire to fit in, to be 'normal'. And for something as public and personal as a wedding, its no wonder that desire is stupidly strong. Even when I thought I was a big girl who was over the junior high insecurities and could be comfortable in my own skin... I think I finally am comfortable in my own skin, but I'm not so comfortable yet in my wedding/couple/public declaration of love skin.

So brain, take some notes, because heres the biz: Forget trying to fit our wedding into any category because 1) it may not fit anywhere 2) it doesn't need to fit anywhere.

I do hope that people come to our wedding and say, "Woah, I've never seen a wedding like this!" Some will say that with a smile on their face, thinking how fun it is to see a unique wedding, while others will scowl at our disrespect to the sacred institution of marriage!

Whatever.

It is what it is and its our own.


Image from ChernobylBob

Peeling Back Another Layer

Today, I reached a new and better place in wedding planning. Ok, so maybe that's premature to say... Today I saw a new and better place in wedding planning and I want to go to there! That place? Its called reality.

I think I once lived in reality. Sometime. Long long ago. Way before this engagement stuff and wedding planning. And since then, reality feels like a far away place told of by wedding graduates who have made it through to the promise land of marriage.

But for now I still live in Wedding Land, living in fear of the Wicked Witch of the WIC and being guided by the Good Witch, Blogda to the Wedding Zen City where the Wizard will make send me home to a blissful, love filled wedding...

Woah. Ok, that metaphor is getting crazy and needs to be put down!

So what I'm really trying to say is this: I've pulled myself away from the WIC and feel very successful in ridding myself of any pressure I feel to have a Martha worthy wedding. I can flip through a colossal bridal magazine and not be phased. I have not, however, learned to bypass the much more manageable but nevertheless intense expectations that are raised by blogs. Mainly, that we will all have a wedding where we are calm, happy, blissed out, totally in love, and supported by a loving community who helped put together this thoughtful day.

Focusing our energy on having this sort of wedding definitely is much better than focusing on a wedding worthy of a magazine spread, but it can still be stressful. Another Damn Wedding posted Friday on her hot pursuit of a blissed-out-couple-loving-spontaneous-community-based-love-fest wedding and I couldn't agree more.

There are many stories in blog land telling of a magical day where the bride wakes up and suddenly, all previous stress and wedding worries have been wiped away. The day then continues as the bride is blown away by all the support and community love her and her involved groom feel. And they live happily ever after!

I want that! I want to know that all the things that are going to stress me out will *WHOOSH* just go away as soon as I wake up on our wedding day. That my community of helpers will be the complete and assuring support that I need. I'm hopeful. I can envision that in my future. But what if blog land has led me to believe in some sort of crazy new idea of a perfectly unperfect day?

Talking to a recently married friend about all this, my friend suddenly says, "You know what? I didn't really like our wedding. I don't look back fondly at it. But that doesn't really matter anymore. We're just happy to be married!" Now, I think that is a great sentiment and I hope that, no matter what, I will simply be happy with getting married to a man who makes my insides smile.

But that's not quite the thing a gal wants to hear in the midst of planning...and in the midst of writing checks that are bigger than shes ever written in her life! I'm hanging on for dear life to this notion that our wedding is going to be an amazing blissed-out-couple-loving-spontaneous-community-based-love-fest. And I'm going to will it to happen.

Not in the crazy denial sense of willing something to happen against better judgment that that thing may not happy... I'm going to will it in the sense that if I wanna be blissed out? then I'm going to be blissed out! Unless some jumbo disaster occurs, I'm going to be rubber on my wedding day. And my wedding community can be my glue. Wedding stress will bounce off of me!

Is that still crazy denial of reality? I dunno. But I'm going to stick with this mad determination to have a great wedding. What alternative is there?

Question: Do you ever wonder what would have happened if you'd never found the wedding blogs? I am almost positive we would have eloped. I would not have had any grounding on which to build the wedding we are building. Would it have been better to elope? Maybe. Parts of me wish we had. But am I happy with our current wedding plans? Yes.

Too many weddings

We are at that age when every summer is full of weddings. And this summer, it feels very different to be a part of that. We are getting married, I will be in one, attending a hand full, and starting to hear talk of a wedding for two of our closest friends in the coming year. Its a very busy time!

I'm finding that it also adds a very difficult element to our planning. I've talked before about all the crazy expectations that come with planning a wedding and trying to stay true to our goals in the face of many differing (and very vocal) opinions. One side of the family thinks our wedding isn't going to be formal enough ("This is your wedding, Jen! Not a child's birthday party!") while the other side can't believe what we are spending and that we are having such a "large" wedding. All very encouraging, thanks families.

And as our wedding represents, we fall somewhere smack in the middle. Our 94 person guest list is the right size for us and includes all of our first ring relatives and close friends. We definitely hurt some feelings and drew some uncomfortable lines to keep it that small, but its what we choose. And I don't feel like its a large group or a really small group. Its just right! (This guest list is too big! This guest list is too small! This guest list is juuuuust right!)

Our budget reflects what we wanted as well. Meaning: a full meal, a place to eat that food, a photographer, a white dress, a suit, and some things mixed in that look pretty. We luckily have the means and partial financial support from my parents to do this and will not go into debt for our wedding. The budget definitely got bigger than we imagined...but we found out very quickly into the planning that the budget we imagined was not realistic for what we wanted. We are sacrificing money instead of sacrificing a day that will represent us and be meaningful to us. *insert cheesy phrase here about making memories to last a lifetime or something*

All these decisions were made with care to fit us as a couple in this particular moment in our relationship and lives.

Enter the wedding season.

I've been talking to a friend of mine whose wedding will be in July. Inevitably, weddings are the major portion of our conversations, but I try to avoid it as much as possible. We are having very different weddings and I want to avoid comparisons. Me comparing our wedding to theirs and her doing the same.

But once wedding season gets into full gear I don't know how to avoid it. I'm scared of attending weddings this summer, seeing what they did, and feeling the expectations all over again. On the flip side, I DO think our wedding is going to be completely awesome...and I don't want to share awesome details that we are doing in case it sounds like "oh yeah? check out what we're doing! isn't that GREAT?" or that I'm gloating about ours.

Anyone else dealt or dealing with this? Advice on how to avoid comparing weddings?

Fridays Rock My Socks

I'm so happy to see Friday. Work has been crazy. A rainy MN day is making me want to go back to bed hardcore. And the wedding is weighing me down. I have a mondo to-do list that I haven't even looked at in ages and don't quite know where to start on. I feel in a good place as far as the wedding, but right now I just want it to be here so we can get this marriage show on the road!

Hence my less than thoughtful posts of late. Shoes! Necklaces! Rings! And yesterday, a very successful first dress fitting with an adorable little lady who is possibly two feet shorter than me and who I am so happy to give my dress to to make it go from giant white sack to slim and trim beauty! (Oh, and by the way...I introduced the dress to green pearl necklace. They are unsure about each other but could be great friends once they get acquainted better. I also introduced the dress to these metallic sandals that I picked up. WOAH. They HATE each other and had to be separated immediately lest some fighting break out! It was terrible.)

So instead of thoughtful wedding land critiques or insights, I'm jumping on board with posting on non wedding real person stuff.

Non wedding things happening in my life:
- Trying to navigate an awesome job where I have been for almost two years now but just got the hang of a few months back. It was a new position when I came in where I am the one person communications team for a department at the University. Aka so much to do and so little time.
- Planning for marriage. What will that mean for us? At the moment we are not a fully integrated couple. We are still two individuals with lots of stake in each other, but I'm looking forward to joining together more in our finances, planning, car ownership, insurance, and all the good stuff!
- Wanting to MOVE. We've both lived in MN our entire lives and have wanted to move out west since I graduated college a couple of years back. An awesome job got in the way (yeah, rough, I know) and then the engagement/wedding came and put off our moving plans. As soon as thats done, I want to GO, get some new scenery, some mountains, and awesome skiing!
- When we move, I have no idea what sort of direction I want to aim my career in.
- Getting in shape. Trying to figure out a lifestyle that I can keep up and that will keep my healthy. Less lazy butt. More buns o' steel!
- I wanna cook and bake more. Which might conflict with the above...
- Enjoying summer! I can't frickin wait for Minnesota to get in gear and summer to come! Summer grilling, boating, laying in sun, biking on all of the awesome bike trails in the Twin Cities, canoe trips down the river, river tubing, weekends at the cabin, AAHH!!! I LOVE SUMMER!!!!

(I'm going to push this rainy, gloomy day away are just stare at this picture all day, dreaming about summer. This is from a past canoe trip down the gorgeous St. Croix River.)

Whats going on in your non-wedding life? Here's hoping this Friday rocks all of your socks as well. Peace!

Ducking the Punches

So I was listening to NPR the other day, and as usual, heard something awesome. It was this lady, Laura Munson, talking about her book called "This Is Not The Story You Think It Is: A Season of Unlikely Happiness”. At first, it sounded like your typical self-help, relationship advice, claiming your life kind of book. Which I'm totally going to admit that I'm a sucker for. I'm constantly self-helping. Not because I really need help, just because I'm always trying to be bigger and better. I see my potential and I want to reach it, dammit!

Anyway, so this book. She talks, she is empowered, she saves her marrigae, it all sounds great. I haven't read the book and only heard pieces of her talk on NPR, but I found an awesome (and short) article that she wrote that covers the gist of her book.

In it she tells of how her husband came to her one day and said, “I don’t love you anymore” and wanted to leave her and their children. Following some crazy zen path, she said “I don’t buy it” and in effect waited him out. Eventually he came around and they have continued to be happily married since. Part of her philosophy is to not take things personally – and even when her husband told her he didn’t love her anymore, she worked to not take it personally. As she describes, he threw a emotional punch at her and instead of making it a fight, she just ducked.

This amazes and baffles me. Its amazing because I totally see the logic behind it and understand how not taking things personally means you can actually work through the issue at hand. It takes a lot of the emotional warfare out between two people and gets to the nitty gritty of whats going on. But it baffles me because I can’t imagine being able to do that! She must be a zen master!

As I said earlier, I’m a sucker for books like this, and this is an area that the mister and I could definitely work on. We come from families who address conflict very differently. I’m a soft Minnesotan who grew up in a soft spoken family where we didn’t argue and never raised our voices. His family is constantly raising voices across the dinner table over whatever hot topic they can find. We’ve worked on reconciling these two styles and have made lots of progress, but the arguing is an art form that we are still learning. We haven’t learned to duck each other’s punches yet and still seem to walk straight into them!

But luckily we have lots of time to learn and even if we get into nasty fights we always come back together stronger and better than before.

Taboo Talk: Budgets

There has been some great discussion in wedding blog land about budgets. Another Damn Wedding has a fabulous post that mirrors my feelings exactly, and Meg at A Practical Wedding speaks sanity and gives amazing advice - as always. Both ladies are spot on.

I think we are all (myself very much included) guilty of judging other weddings - whether this be the magazine weddings that are worth the total of my undergraduate education or the blog weddings that are ridiculously DIY/DIT and amazing and cost a few months rent. We are constantly comparing and judging.

And in the end everybody loses.

By judging and comparing our weddings to other weddings, we slowly lose focus on whats important, and it becomes a race to impress. Our wedding must be full of stunning details which are totally unique and we must have a memorably delicious cake with details to match our perfectly coordinated theme... but we don't want to be one of those crazy Knot brides (oh, Knot, how we love to pick on you!) so we must craft it all ourselves for super cheap (preferably vintage) and you better hope you have talented family and friends willing to help or how else are you going to look calm and cool in your beautiful, artsy photographs that are going to make everyone jealous on Facebook?

**deep breaths**

All we can see of these magazine or blog weddings are pictures - still images of one day in someones life who we know nothing about. Perhaps some captions or a story that tell us how they put it all together. But what do we know about the couple? their lives? their love? their wedding!? Damn little - that's what we know.

As I said, I'm completely guilty of all of this. I judge and compare and lose my mind in the details and design. For me, a lot of this has to do with the immensely personal nature of weddings. I'm an introverted Minnesotan, and I feel like I'm really putting myself out there with our wedding. Not only are we publicly declaring our love and commitment, but our wedding is a showcase of us as a couple. Our style, tastes, eco-ethics, religious beliefs (or lack there of for us), class (which Accordions and Lace wrote an excellent post on), generally where we 'fit in', how traditional we are, etc. will all be on display. How are people going to react? What are they going to think of it all? Will they judge us? Some scary prospects.

But the same fact that can make it scary is what makes is sane. Weddings are personal and we have to make personal decisions about ours. We all fall at different points on the range of budgets, how traditional we are, etc. And in planning our own, we have to find the confidence to stand by our personal decisions and feel secure enough as a person and as a couple that we made the right decisions. It won't be perfect, but it will be ours. Not matter what the Knot says.

Note: In the name of full disclosure, I'd like to share that our budget is going to fall roughly around 10,000. I believe that putting real numbers out there to go with all our pretty pictures helps take away the taboo and helps us understand better what weddings cost. I wish I had had examples of real wedding budgets before we started planning. I had no idea what 10,000 would get us. So. There is my number.

How Typical

Before we were engaged, I was reading wedding blogs and starting to think about our wedding and about getting married. Then we got engaged and my organized, list-making, control freak self went into overdrive and became engrossed in Wedding Land. I read wedding blogs daily, had many many Google documents full of ideas, links, and photos, and started to fill my wonderful and nerdy wedding binder. My brain was wedding grand central.

During this time, I was lucky enough to find some sane resources (A Practical Wedding is my wedding savior!) to help me muddle through many wedding issues. I came to terms with spending thousands on one day. I understood that weddings can actually mean something more than just pretty details if you let them. And I began to pull myself away from the various pressures and all the various labels (WIC, indie, alternative, vintage, 'green') so that I could determine what I wanted.

Unfortunately, I think I left my Mister behind in this. I didn't share the important parts of my Wedding Land journey like I should have. And he wasn't really that interested to begin with. He is usually pretty happy with the way things are while I continually want to analyze, dig deeper and make things better - like our relationship, the wedding, our to-be marriage.

So yesterday we had a bit of a fight. Well, it was probably more like a break down on my part. The story goes like this. The Mister wanted to elope. I wanted a big, fun party. I didn't want a ceremony but he did. In the end we are having a big, fun party that looks like most other weddings but should represent us very well as a couple. I am paying for half of the wedding and my parents are paying for the other half. The Mister's work situation has left him with not much money in the bank.

He is still stuck on the cost of the wedding and since he isn't paying for it, feels like he needs to forfeit his opinions and input. I understand where he is coming from, but I need to feel like he is invested and interested in the day. I need to feel like he is looking forward to the wedding that I'm spending so much time, money and effort on.

We made the decision together to have the wedding we are having - but I feel like its all me. And that only adds to my wedding insecurities and makes me feel like I'm the dreaded bridezilla who is getting my way while her groom sits helplessly by. And it only adds to my insecurities that we are spending too much or that the wedding is being blown out of proportions or that I'm just not doing this wedding thing 'right'.

Last night involved lots of tears and mood swings from sadness to despair to anger back to bleak sadness. We talked it out a bit, but I think we'll need to talk more. Tears and running noses doesn't make for a very good discussion. But I think we both understand where each other are coming from and now we just have to move forward in a new direction. So that we can have a wedding where we are both invested, interested and active participants.

*phew* Ok, I feel better to get that off of my chest! Thanks, blog land.


Photo from

http://www.flickr.com/photos/swirlingthoughts/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Struck

Before getting engaged, I will say that I was a bit against weddings. I wanted to avoid all the drama and just have a big, fun party. Since getting engaged, I’ve changed my tune a bit and our big, fun party is looking more and more like a wedding. And that’s fine. In essence it’s still a big, fun party, but I’ve learned that there are a lot of great parts of weddings and I am excited to include these parts!

My favorite part so far has been that of community. We’ve had people offering help and services like I never expected. I’ve gotten to hang out with my aunts and cousin all to brainstorm and craft for the wedding. Sometimes I feel apologetic for taking up their time, but in the end I know that they love helping out and applying their skills and knowledge to our wedding. And it is so much fun to be in the center of this outpouring of help, love, and creativity!

It’s bonding time that I can’t imagine happening in any other way at this moment in my life (I’m sure having a baby could be similar but that is way, way far away), and I feel as though I’m going through a right of passage. The other weekend I was sitting at a table with my mom and two of my aunts. Mom had her wedding album out and the three of them were sharing wedding memories. It was fun to hear about their favorite parts, the mishaps, and their perspectives from each others weddings. And to feel excited for our wedding so that we could add to this shared experience and group memory.

It makes me hopeful that all this time, energy, and money will be well spent.

Image from maz hewitt

Deciding whats important

We are less than six months out from our wedding (EEEK!) and have most of the major decisions done (venue, officiant, caterer, photographer). And we are now moving on to the details of our wedding that in the end will (hopefully!) make it feel personal and feel like us. This is the point where I need to reign in all the ideas that have been floating around, nail them down, and commit to them. I'm trying to make sure that I focus on things that will be important the day of and let go of the things that in the end won't really matter. But how do we know which is which?

I've come to realize the importance of things in many different ways - sometimes intentionally, but mostly in a completely random, roundabout way.

On the intentional side: The Mister and I have done lots of discussing and negotiating to pull out what is important to us. And I have found the (sane) blogs helpful by just noticing what I like in the photos or discussions - and as has been said before, its the smiles and love radiating from the photos that makes them amazing! So that's, great, cuz smiles are free! yay!

But mainly its random when I find out if something is important or not. And this is where it gets messy. Cuz this is the drama of mixed opinions and too much input on what sort of attire or music or cake or whatever to have. And that's when you have to take time to figure out whether to stick up to your guns - is it really that important to you? or compromise - is it really that important to them? Argue...I mean, discussions can help here too or it can help to just picture the day of with or without that certain element. Would you be sad? Disappointed? Not give a rats butt?

Or I like to play a little game my friend taught me. (It works best if you can teach this game to your partner, and they can spring it on you.) For whatever the decision, leave it to a coin toss. Assign heads/tails - flip - and see what the results are. If cupcakes win and you feel a sigh of relief inside, then nix the five tier professionally baked cake! Its really just a way to force your brain to decide which side of the fence its on and you can feel the relief or disappointment in a certain decision almost immediately. But as noted, it does work best if someone else can spring it on you and try to be serious about it - better to fool your brain with.

Then. I have to make a decision and be done. No rethinking. And when you find out how to do this, please fill me in!

No, really...I don't care

There are areas of wedding planning that I think are really fun, pretty, exciting, meaningful, etc etc. There are areas of wedding planning that I think are horrible (favors. screw favors.) and want to avoid all together. And then there are areas in between where I just don't really care. I don't care much what our centerpieces look like. I don't really care what the ladies standing up for me wear. And it has surprised me that I don't really care about the cake. As long as it makes it to my mouth and is tasting good, I'm happy!

But this doesn't work so well in wedding planning. And I'm getting frustrated with the expectations of me to be this all knowing bride who has everything figured out and knows what she wants and can make snappy decisions on demand!

Now, I know that I do need to make these decisions because they are mine to make. My mister generally cares less than me and defers to my opinion on most things wedding. I need to be the captain and the anchor of this wedding and make solid decisions, but sometimes I don't know what I want or just haven't seen an option that I really like. So in the meantime I sit on my hands and when asked about these topics shrug and say, "I dunno! I'll get to that later!"

Photo by Alfred Cheney Johnston

Chemical Reactions

Before we get too far along, perhaps now is a good time to give a little info on why I chose the title "Me, Myself & Bride".

There was some crazy chemical reaction or something when I said a simple "Yes" to a simple question of "Will you". This chemical reaction turned me from a normal person...suddenly into a bride! I didn't know what this meant, but all of a sudden my life was consumed by wedding this and wedding that! and oh my gosh, so many things to do! The Knot told me that I was already late on 90 items of my 370 item to-do list! WTF!?

Whether I wanted it or not, I was slapped with the label of bride and all that goes with it. Advice and suggestions started pouring in. My schedule filled up with things to do. And I suddenly had a binder. A crazy (but awesome) wedding binder that came with me everywhere!

I can't say this was all involuntary. Parts of it were fun (like the binder...I LOVE organization! weeee!) and there are lots of aspects of the wedding that I was/am honestly excited for and anxious to start on.

So. One day I was me, myself and I.....the next, I had changed to be Me, Myself & Bride with a significant portion of my identity now wrapped up in getting married/having a wedding.

The other reason for the title is simply that I can be horribly indecisive - especially about things that are supposed to be "perfect!" for your "BIG day!" AAAHHH!!! So much pressure! And now its like having split personalities with a new "bride" persona in the mix. Me and myself aren't sure how to handle this new one. Hopefully they all learn to get along soon. We've got a ways to go.

Photo from Sara Björk

Me, Myself and Bride

Welcome to my first ever blogging shindig! Never did I think I would become a daily blog reader...let alone a reader of many wedding blogs...let alone then start my own wedding blog! So this is a surprising and exciting new thing for me.

Let me just start out with a simple introduction. Hi, my name is Jen. I'm engaged and being eaten alive by the Wedding Industrial Complex (WIC). After months of reading wonderful, down to earth, insightful and beautiful wedding blogs, I thought my own engagement and wedding planning process would be smooooth sailing. I thought I was ahead of the game, had my head screwed on straight, and could handle anything the WIC threw at me. Wrong.

I generally have my head screwed on straight, but apparently it wasn't screwed on tightly enough because I got rocked in the first month or two of being engaged. I listened to too many opinions, looked at too many pretty pictures that I then wanted to have for my own, and really didn't have any knowledge of just how much a wedding would cost.

Enter this blog.

I'm trying to take note, examine, enjoy and learn from this crazy mash up of events and emotions that is wedding planning so I can come out the other side of this a better, married person (and that me and my mister come out a better, married couple!). So this blog begins as a way to help myself, but as I organize my thoughts and reflect, maybe I can share something useful with cyber wedding land along the way.

Wish me luck! :)