I would apologize for not updating in a while, but it isn’t really negligence that has kept me away so much as being busy and having a healthy sense of self-preservation. Right now I’m wide awake from a combination of Excedrin Migraine (caffeine helps the body pick up the pain killers) and relief because my migraine is gone.
As usual, I have about three hundred things on my mind, not the least of which is how to break the news of my upcoming wedding – and figuring out how much I can complain about it before people start telling me to suck it up.
The wedding will be in April and – due to the fact that Ricardo and I are paying for it ourselves – there won’t be that many people invited. I have to say that it’s actually going to complicate things to keep it small, but inviting more people means much more money than we can afford to gather. A lot of people are going to be offended by this. I just have that feeling.
The thing is, if I invited everyone who wants to be at my wedding then we’d never be able to afford the wedding in the first place. Not to mention that there are some people who would want to be at my wedding whose attendance would make me angry or upset – which isn’t the kind of memory I want to make on that day.
Still, there are several people I love who aren’t invited just for the simple fact that we had to draw the line somewhere so we wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the cost. We don’t want financial help and truthfully we don’t even want wedding presents – we just want to get married and hopefully everyone can be happy for us whether they’ve received an invitation or not.
The other issue is that, among the emotional/mental pitfalls of dealing with some of the complicated familial relationships we have, there have been people who have always disapproved of our relationship in general. I’ve heard reasons varying from racial differences, cultural differences, presumed religious differences (we’re both Baptist, though, so that was off the mark), the age difference between us, the presumed “experiential” difference between the two of us – and so on. The fact of the matter is, the events that shaped the two of us over the course of our lives to this point have shaped us to be excellent partners, best friends, and contributed to a near-sickening degree of romance. I’m not a romantic-type person, but I promise I could make you gag with the sweetness-and-light type of descriptions that come to mind when I think of my husband to be.
Also, I’m not blind to his faults nor he to mine. We’re pretty fault-ridden people, being mortal and all, and we have thus far managed to cope without resorting to violence.
Those faults can still make it frustrating, though. I am, for starters, cynical, impatient, and I like to have everything planned to a frightening degree. I tend to overshare, overthink, and create problems where none really exist. I won’t talk about his faults, because if he wanted you to know them, he’d tell you.
Mine, however, have turned the wedding planning into a nightmare.
I’m terrified the whole thing is going to blow up in my face and I’ll be miserable for the rest of my life, living alone in a tiny apartment with a slew of cats as my only company. I keep having this vision in my head of me, in my not-yet-altered wedding dress (which is about two feet too long), standing at the front of the chapel with the wedding papers in my hand…totally alone.
February is almost over and we have yet to have an officiant, a wedding program, a reception location, a honeymoon destination, a wedding cake, and any number of smaller details. The thing is, this isn’t my wedding, it’s our wedding and this is one of those situations where I can’t really just push my sleeves up and take the helm myself. I have to consider what he wants, because the day should be good for him, too.
Honestly, for all the fuss, I’m not sure I really care about the wedding so much as I care about the act of getting married. I’ve found the one person I’m willing to spend the rest of my life with, no matter what may come, and I don’t think that ten or fifteen years for now I’m going to dwell overmuch on whether or not the wedding was picture-perfect and executed without a hitch. I’m going to care about whether or not it happened.
Right now, that’s my biggest fear: that the wedding won’t happen, despite the fact that we’ve sent out invitations and reserved a chapel. In fact, we’re going to see the chapel tomorrow for a tour – we’ve seen it from the outside and since it’s mostly glass on the outside we’ve seen the inside, we just haven’t actually been inside yet to walk around and look at the little details.
It sucks.
I’d love to be excited and giddy, but I can’t muster it. Ricardo’s strength is that he’s a detailed planner. No stone is left unturned when he’s planning to do anything, and he investigates like a pro. He has ideas about everything, valuable input and feedback, and because of that I’m sitting there, impatiently tapping my foot and thinking “Let’s get the show on the road, already!” I like to think I’m just as thorough as he is, but faster. (Which is probably not true.)
I’m just one of those people that, once I’ve made up my mind about something, I make it happen. So while I may be slow to make a decision, and talk you to death with wishy-washy details, I’m a full-speed-ahead kind of gal once I know what I want. Ricardo gets things done with more surety, and he won’t speak until he’s about ready to make his final decision.
That difference in approaches has never really seemed like a stumbling block until I was hit with the prospect of jointly planning a wedding. If it was up to me, we would have gone out to buy all the little accessories and set everything up for the officiant, reception, cake, dress alterations, etc. in about two weeks and then coasted into April having to deal only with the most minor of details.
Instead we’re about at the halfway point and all we really have firmly set is the location for the ceremony. I’m about ready to snap. Unfortunately, I have enough sense to realize that not only would snapping at Ricardo not solve anything, but it wouldn’t be productive and honestly he doesn’t deserve it. There’s no real excuse for me to be churlish. The stress has been created by my own overheated imagination and the fear that this – like so many other things in my life – is going to go down in flames despite my efforts to shore up the edges and make it work.
Can we say “control issues?”
I know! I’m terrible. >.< It’s one of the reasons I’m blogging about this, though. I need to vent somewhere before I explode – and really exploding all over my fiance might be the best way to get the opposite result from what I want. In the end, that leaves my wringing my hands and wondering what to do. At my best, I think about the fact that I love my fiance and he loves me, and we’re best friends so we’ll get through this. At my worst, I think of him as a male version of Scarlet O’Hara looking at the wedding as saying continuously, “I’ll think about it tomorrow.”
Of course that’s unfair of me. I’m actually starting to hate myself quite a bit because I never imagined I’d be so bitter over something that should be making me happy. I don’t think I’ve gone Bridezilla, because I just can’t make myself feel invested in the wedding when nothing is happening, but something has definitely gone screwy.
My biggest worry, though, after the actual planning, is the guest list. People are going to be hurt or upset or angry because they aren’t invited and I’m not sure how to handle that. If I invited everyone who would want to come it would be a nightmare, and not just logistically. Somehow, though, people in general don’t seem to get that. They think (and I’ve seen a few remarks like this) “Well I understand you can’t invited more than an allotted amount of people, but surely I should be invited since I love you/like you so much/know you so well/am related to you/care about you/have known you for x amount of years/want to do something nice for you…”
Well, I’ve looked at the numbers and I’ve looked at the people in my life , and I’ve made hard decisions which while they may seem callous even to those who are on my guest list, have a hefty amount of reasoning behind them. Ricardo has even suggested that I make it easier by telling people it was him who objected to them coming to the wedding, but I just don’t think it’s right to hide behind him. We both worked on the guest list, and he isn’t a tyrant. I just hope people will respect my decisions and not hassle me about them. It didn’t fail to invite someone because I forgot about them, or discounted them, or have decided do denounce them, or because I don’t love them, or out of maliciousness.
I had to consider the following:
1) How much money do we have in our budget? (i.e. How many people can we afford to feed at a reception, including wedding favors, wedding cake, etc.?)
2) How far would our guests have to travel to get here? (Also, how much would it cost them, and how much notice would they need?)
3) Who is it that has played the biggest role(s) in my life/our lives? (It sounds sort of mean, but really does it make sense to invite someone who is more acquaintance than friend – or who you remember as always making you miserable when you were a kid?)
4) Does this person respect us and our relationship? (This is, unfortunately, an issue. I refuse to invite anyone who does not offer respect to myself or my future husband. It would be farcical to invite someone disrespectful to my wedding.)
5) Will this person want to come out of affection or obligation? (Or just for a party?)
It sounds like a harsh list even to me, but it’s a reasonable list, too. If you think about it on a personal and practical level, it’s sensible.
One of my best friends had a huge wedding – bigger than she even wanted because her mom was footing the bill and therefore felt entitled to influence almost everything – and she ended up inviting a family member who had the ill-mannered arrogance to actually approach her and her new husband at the reception and tell here about what a b**** she was. Dear God I do not want that at my wedding! You know you have family members who would say things like that to you at your wedding, or make an inappropriate toast speech, or do something that would either make you angry, or make you want to cry.
My approach is to avoid that possibility.
That doesn’t mean everyone who isn’t invited is seen as a potential social disaster – there are actually a few people that I haven’t invited who mean the world to me, but whom I felt for various reasons shouldn’t be asked to attend. In some cases it’s because I don’t really keep in touch with this person, because they would have to travel a long distance, because travel is expensive and I wouldn’t be able to offer assistance or a place to stay – or simply because it’s someone who may feel closer to me than I feel to them. I don’t doubt that there are more people out there who love and care about me than will be present at my wedding, but I’ve had to consider practical issues (like money) with a very serious eye toward not beggaring us in the first days of our marriage just to have the wedding that other people expect.
I do hope people will understand that, and not hold it against me. However, I’m a pretty hard person and my attitude is that if someone were to decide the lack of an invitation is an unpardonable insult to them that ends our relationship, then I’m not too interested in the relationship anyway. It’s one thing to keep up the mutual give-and-take of a healthy relationship, and another thing entirely to think that a relationship requires groveling for forgiveness for transgressions, versus willing forgiveness of an unintentional slight. I will grant that I’m not an easy friend to have because of that attitude.
In any case…I’ll try and update about wedding progress for those who want to follow along or offer support. It’s more likely to drive me nuts than anything I’ve come across thus far.