I don't discriminate against Dickheads

About a year ago, I started a page on this site, which covered the basics of my getting married. I did this because the wedding became something that would undoubtedly take over everything, so I had to recognise its existence, but at the same time I actually didn’t want to talk about it- frankly, it bored me.

After the wedding I closed the page off. It was done, finished with. But again I need to recognise its existence. So, here it is- the first and last time I will talk about my wedding.

The first thing you need to understand about me is that I have never imagined my own wedding. Okay, I take that back- I dreamt of my wedding once, but upon looking down and seeing me in a wedding dress, I pissed myself laughing so much that I woke up.

I also hate the expectations that planning a wedding puts on people, especially women. Why should the fact that you’re planning a wedding be an excuse for going into debt, or taking time and concentration away from your work, or suddenly treating friends as slaves with the excuse that they are the ‘bridal party’? So, no, I didn’t suddenly disappear in a fog of inspiration boards and colour swatches and wanting to be a ‘princess’. Not me.

The other thing you need to understand about this is that the idea of holding a party, being the centre of attention and wearing a dress is pretty close to my idea of hell. However, I do feel the need that a wedding  is a thing worth celebrating, so if I’m going to have to do it, I might as well go the full hog.

And by full hog, I mean a wedding mass on a Holy Day of Obligation. Which meant white everything and little choice in the readings. The one reading we did get to put in took out one about a dragon with seven heads, which was admittedly metal, but inappropriate. But I digress.

Anyway, I do have a sense of detachment about the whole thing. For a lot of the wedding planning, I felt like someone playing a role in someone else’s idea of a wedding- hell, I was even given lines at the ceremony- and I was fine with that because I didn’t feel this is something that I was ever going to do, that I wouldn’t do it it wasn’t my wedding, and had no idea or desire to do things differently.

I know that sounds as though I was either a) coerced into having a certain type of wedding or b) not ‘ready’ for a wedding. It might even sound bitter. And I swear it’s none of these things. I just concentrated on the marriage rather than the wedding, on the commitment rather than the window dressing, but you’ve got to understand that it took a year to get there. A person puts me in a dress and cakes me with makeup and I’m never going to feel like myself. But I wasn’t comfortable with the alternatives either.

In conclusion: My ‘perfect wedding’ has never existed because it wouldn’t involve me. I just had to cope.

So, things that I learned doing the whole shebang:

1. There will be a lot of people whose happiness hinges on the wedding besides you and your betrothed. If you are people pleasers like we are, this presents an issue, because it turns into ‘not your wedding’. There are things that we would have done differently and if we would have frankly the result would have been the same. So you can’t call it a regret, can you.
   To put it another way that is a little less caustic: you will find that a lot of people care about your wedding, both in the planning and the execution. I think the issue on my end is that they cared about the minute details a hell of a lot more than I did.
2. On that, unimportant things become big and important things become small. I was at a dinner and in a deep conversation about layouts of the wedding booklets with my (then) fiance, whan suddenly I see a flicker in the corner of my eye and people start singing. It was my birthday dinner and I forgot and had ignored everybody else because of those bloody booklets. True story. Not the best birthday.
3. Weddings should be done Properly. You’d think that Properly implies a traditionalism, but not really, because wedding planning is also littered with the zombified corpses of people common in their desire to be individual (and truthfully, looking the same in the process). Unfortunately there is no clear definition on what Properly is. But you’re both supposed to be able to answer the question “But you want it done Properly, don’t you?” in the affirmative and know what it means.
4. Remember school? Engagements are like a big assignment that you feel guilty about when you’re not doing it, and when you are doing it, you want to be anywhere else. Getting back to playing videogames and watching movies and doing normal things like writing in this blog without feeling guilt has been awesome.
5. Announcing your engagement is like a coming out party for strangers to talk about your uterus and its activities. There are two types of people who ask me about my plans for children: people who have no right to ask and people who should better than to ask.
6. Don’t move house in the week before the wedding. Just don’t.

What- you were here to actually find out about the wedding? Fair enough. Rant part over. The post is starting to get a bit long, but you know, first and last time, so I have to push on. There’s a lot that happened during the day, but some thoughts are clearer than others:

• I wasn’t nervous. At all. Not even flatulence nervous. I guess that meant that I was ready, although equally I could have been in denial about the whole thing. Got towards the church half an hour early (as it was a open Mass I couldn’t be late). So we went to a local heritage-y place for a coffee to waste time. And then got to the church precisely on time.
• You know when you watch TV and there’s a mystery person in the studio audience who laughs just a bit too loud? I had a mystery hymn singer that I could hear over everyone else. I know who it is.
• I had a veil and desperately wanted to uncover my face, but didn’t get a chance until the kiss, and I think my mum yelled out ‘so that’s who it is!”. She certainly thought it. One of the downsides to no rehearsal, although the priest talked us through as we went along. On that, my parents-in-law were scared that we’d do a fist pump instead of a kiss, but pumping fists is only one of several alternatives to making out in front of your parents so they should have been grateful all of these years.
• I don’t think I made a fool of myself not knowing when to stand and sit and kneel.
• My first name on the marriage certificate is the typo on the birth certificate. Changing my name is going to be doubly the bitch.
• We had the (now) novelty of having a church that allowed confetti- outside at least. I took advantage of this by buying ten boxes to add some colour to the white- wedding- ness. I paid the price when my godmother poured half a box down my cleavage, where it stayed all night in the confines of my ‘supportive garment’. It still covers the floor of the unit now.
• I have a lot of photos of us looking at other cameras. Hopefully the photos where people leeched off the professional photographer won’t end up on the mantlepieces of relatives. History says that they will. But at the moment that’s all I have to show (that’s why there’s no photos in this post for the moment. I’ll add them later).
• After the wedding, we went to visit my new great- aunt- in- law who is 100 and lives in a nursing home. She was flirting with the best man, but I think it was only because he’s bloody tall and she honed in on the biggest blur.
• The reception was full of not speaking enough to people and funky music and food. People seemed to get along, which is all we wanted. There was a mafia wedding at the other room in the venue that night, judging by the security,and it sounded as if they were suffering under the weight of expectation.
• Everyone wanted to know about the honeymoon. We hadn’t booked it- yet.

The next morning, we woke up and asked “What do we have to do today?” It took a while to realise the answer was Nothing. Thank goodness that it’s all behind us, but it’s all ahead of us too.