So I ended up missing Saturday’s group ride because I overdid it on Thursday and my back hurt like hell until Sunday night. Monday, I decided to make up for it and I went out and rode 35 miles (very few hills, so I rode a little longer than prescribed). I was a little ow-y on Tuesday, but manageable.
But I’m looking at my calendar and realizing the odds of me getting all my rides in over the next couple of weeks, especially the group rides, are ridiculously poor. It’s probably going to be all about quality time with the stationary bikes at the gym, at like 5 in the morning. Not too thrilling to write about.
See, I’m getting married in, like 10 days.
It’s really impeding my ability to get things done.
Up until the last week or so, Alexander and I have managed not to let it get in the way of real life. We’re doing something small, on the (relatively) cheap, and highly irreverent, as far as wedding thingies go. And I am so sick of thinking about it.
However, it’s all I’ve got in my head right now. So today, I’m going to digress on the topic of weddings.
I was a little kid, at the height of my dress-up and make-believe years, when Lady Di married Prince Charles and the nation was transfixed by their wedding. Families clustered around television sets watching the century’s last ostentatious display of royalty. Captivated by a royal fantasy even greater than than the one inspired by Grace Kelly, mothers held their daughters close and stared at their televisions wishing it could be them and communicating that desire to their daughters. The model was set for a generation of brides to aspire to — the bride-as-princess is an image none of us who grew up with television in the last 30 years can get away from, whether we agree with it or not.
However, for whatever reason, it never really caught ahold of me. My desire was less Princess Di and more Stevie Nicks.
And as I grew up, I’d occasionally think about what it would be like to be married to the boyfriend of the moment, but it never crossed my mind to imagine our wedding. I usually just jumped straight ahead to the first fight about money.
When Alexander and I decided to get married, I encountered so many people who were far more excited about it than I was. Apparently the bridal fantasy is so ingrained in our culture that everyone assumes you’re engaging in it. If I had a good financial planner and a buck for every time someone (a woman) asked me how things were going and looked at me knowingly and said, “you must be up to your eyeballs in wedding planning,” Alexander and I actually wouldn’t need to get a mortgage.
Do you have a date, where are you having it, what’s your dress going to look like, what are your colors?
What are my fucking colors? I don’t have any colors! They’re blue and red and we’re going to have a West Side Story-style gang dance fight when the Crips and the Bloods come out! Do you really think that colors are what I’m occupying my brain with? Have you ever met me?
What gets me the most is the assumption that my blasé attitude about the wedding is somehow flawed. That I “don’t understand,” and I’ll regret it if I don’t do it a certain way.
Logically, it seems that I’d be far more likely to regret spending thousands of dollars on a one-day party that most invitees will only be passively interested in attending because they know they “should.”
Seems more likely I’d regret not having a pre-nuptial agreement to simplify the divorce process if that should ever have to happen.
Seems more likely I’d regret spending a crapload of cash on a dress that’s completely inappropriate to wear to any other event and that I will then vacuum pack and seal into a box, never to look at it again.
But no one’s mentioning those things to me. And what cranks me up even further is that no one’s asking Alexander about these things. Apparently it’s only MY problem, and the looks I get when I say things like “we” indicate with a slight headshake that I’m just so foolish for trying to get him involved. The best I can hope for is that he’ll hold my purse while I’m shopping.
I’d understand if that were coming only from my mother’s generation. But it’s even women about my age, who I run into at the feminist bookstore and have strong careers that they’ve built for themselves by themselves and have said things to me a long the lines of “never stay in a relationship that isn’t a partnership.” Even these women are falling prey to the assumption that a wedding is the bride’s “big day” — that it’s the day when we all get to trade in the pillowcase for tulle, and we may love the man standing in the groom’s spot, but just like when we were kids, it doesn’t really matter who’s standing there because it’s all about the girl in the white dress.
Alexander and I have spent the last few years building a relationship that I’m really proud of. It’s actually a partnership, held and honored between two individuals. We make decisions together, celebrate the positives and re-group after the negatives. I’m not holding it up as some example of the perfect relationship—of course we’ve got issues we’ve got to work out. But we worked long and hard to get here—two incredibly fierce individuals who never saw themselves in a long-term partnership coming together to create a relationship that we are both happy with.
In a nutshell, that means that we do things together. We discuss what we both want and don’t want, throw out the highs and lows, and come to a strong average.
When we decided to get married, it was exactly that. There were no bent knees or rings hidden a bouquet or any of that crap. We came to it after a discussion about rights and benefits and weighing our options between marriage, civil partnership, and just letting it go.
And when we decided to have a wedding, we decided what kind of party we’d like to throw and that we’d work together to achieve it. No one in our parents’ generation, most specifically our parents, seems to get this, and it’s hard to make it clear to them without being abjectly rude.
For months, we told our families that we were not planning a “typical” or “traditional” wedding and it’d be best for everyone if all involved started to think of it as more of a party, and ease themselves out of any attachments to the white wedding ideal.
But when we visited Alexander’s mother, every month she’d have a new issue of every bridal magazine on the market, carefully laid out on coffee tables and tucked into bookshelves. My mother could well have been doing the same thing, but she lives further away so I don’t see her coffee table on a weekly basis.
These magazines will not be clues to what we want, we told Mom Deux. Save your money and your time and just let us do our thing.
“Of course,” she’d nod, and then subscribe to yet another magazine when we left.
Occasionally, we’d be telling her about whatever loose plans we had or didn’t have, and she’d come up with some errand for Alexander to run or a broken thing to ask him to repair around the house. As soon as he was out of earshot, she’d pull me aside and look at me knowingly. “He’s got a really strong personality,” she’d tell me as though I’d just met him and didn’t have one myself.
“Don’t let him push you into something you don’t want.” I’d smile and, as politely as possible, tell her that I’m not. All the stuff we’d just been discussing? It was actually my idea.
When people find out how stripped down and non-standard our thing is going to be, and that it’s basically at my request, they really don’t know what to do with it from there. They lower their eyes, look away…. “Oh. well that’s good…I guess.”
In truth, most of this is my idea. Alexander is a good guy. He wants me to happy, and he also likes a good party. I’m pretty sure that if I really wanted trappings of the traditional wedding, if I actually did want to play princess, he’d support it and find a way to make it work, because it’s what I wanted. I’m not much for grand displays, but he is.
So the wedding we’re coming up with, part subversion of tradition, part big-ass party, is a nice compromise.
If we were actually doing it MY way, we’d have gotten married at the all-night donut shop downtown and emailed everyone pictures after the fact.
