Y’know, I get engaged and then for a year and a half, I’m affected in some way by planning the wedding on a daily basis. Because there’s so much to do, and I’m quite decidedly someone who has a preference for not doing things, usually I would let it affect me negatively. (I’m being honest, here, not mean.) We agreed very early on that what we wanted our wedding to be, above all, is something that will create one huge day of love & friends & family & frivolous eating and drinking & memories for everyone to share, forever.

But since last February, I’ve been kinda leaning towards focusing pretty much only on the less-than-romantic aspects of what a wedding is. Meaning it’s been all of the following things to me.

• Something for which to save lots of money.
• Something to help R plan in great detail.
• Something to look forward to but to use as a horizon at which to stop planning for anything else.
• Something to use as an excuse for not doing lots of other things.
• Something with which to fill task lists.
• Something to fight about.
• Something to worry about.
• Something to create strife within (but thankfully not across) families.

But it’s now 5 days away, and over the last week or so, I’ve finally started to see it as… well, what it is.

A day in which I will have the most beautiful person I know, standing by my side, with her hand in mine, vowing to stay there forever. I can’t wait.

None of you have any idea how interesting life is with this woman. And I don’t even mean interesting in the most idealist or romantic sense – I just mean that, when I take the time to sit back and OBSERVE us, we are a fascinating entity. And on Saturday the 13th of October, we put rings on fingers, becoming one family, one whole thing, that will fascinate us for the rest of our lives. If nothing else happens that day, that will be enough.

For example, we’ve been engaged for 18 months, and I’ve leaned towards thinking about the wedding day itself as all those things above. I would be willing to bet the farm that R, if she ever painted a picture with those types of words, probably dismissed them and gave them no weight whatsoever, and moved on to making the wedding hers. Owning it. Planning it down to the tiniest detail. And not stopping to think about any of those other things that I was thinking for us. One would posit a guess that maybe that would lead us to fight a lot about sharing the efforts, about sharing the ambition to have a great wedding, about marrying someone who cares too much/too little about details. It didn’t. We fascinate each other, we balance each other, we are commited to each other. We work out the details of our life together and how to live it, sometimes through heated conversation, but always with both of us knowing that we are going to figure it out, and it will be fascinating.

I think part of the reason I might have been disposed to thinking of it the way I did is because I wasn’t terribly involved in the planning itself. I didn’t even do some of the typical head-nodding, “Yes, Dear”-ing that you would expect the typical guy to do, because I wasn’t even asked the questions. Ask me if I helped when asked, sure, I helped. Ask me if I had opinions about lots of the big things that were considered, of course I did. But ask me what kind of flowers we’re having, the name of our photographer, or what’s on the menu other than the main course, and I would have to ask R for her wedding binder.

Maybe that’s stuff that doesn’t matter to me. I think I saw R start taking this whole thing by the horns the day after I proposed, and I said there’s no way that I’m gonna be able to hop on unless she actually makes room for me to hop on. (The wedding is a bull? Analogy-maker still feet-to-Jesus, I guess.)

As much strife or anxiety or work as my inactivity may have caused R & us as a couple since we got engaged, I guess I don’t apologize for it, because to me, the only thing that really matters is putting rings on fingers. What really matters is saying words to each other that declare us as a husband and wife ’til death do us part in front of 132 of our closest friends & family. Doesn’t matter what’s in the centerpieces or whether the programs match the bridesmaid dress colors perfectly or whether my family members were peeved over not being allowed to bring children. Everything else… well, had we been so inclined, or had we been ten years older and ten times more financially secure, we could have paid someone else to do. But we chose, R chose, to do it all herself, to make it hers/ours, in lots of ways beyond just the ceremony.

I guess the whole point is that, now when I sit back and think about our wedding, as it approaches in five days, I’m NOT thinking about it the same way. I see it as
something that will, without a doubt, be one huge day of love & friends & family & frivolous eating and drinking & memories for everyone to share, forever. That’s all it will be, and that’s all that we wanted. If the cake melts, if the clouds open up & dump rain all over northern Jersey, or even if I’m stuck in a powder blue ruffle-tux from the Liberace House of Crap, it doesn’t matter. At noon on Saturday, I will be R’s husband, and I will continue to lead a fascinating life, with her by my side.

And then there will be lots of drinking. Lots of eating. Lots of great music. And lots of memories for us all to share, forever. Can’t wait.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 2:45 pm and is filed under fascinating, the big day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.