Advice for Making Your Wedding Really Special

During bathroom breaks and between naps, I am currently reading Shopaholic Ties the Knot, by Sophie Kinsella. I love Becky Bloomwood, her insights gained from her I Love Lucy-esque mishaps with men, credit cards, and leggy models, and the fact that she remains a wholly likeable character after the fact. Her quest to get married is no exception; I find myself laughing a little at her expense, and then wanting to give her a hug.

Wedding culture is an oft-discussed aspect of today's society. Girls drop thousands of dollars for Vera Wang, fancy up-dos, and ugly bridesmaids dresses, with men pressured to give up three months of paychecks for some nice stones. Magazines, professional photographers the Lifetime channel, and Hollywood makes billions selling their wares for vulnerable brides-to-be, for whom there can be no expense spared. According to AFWPI.com, approximately 2,160,000 weddings occurred in the United States from December 2005 to December 2006, which collaboratively cost roughly $86 billion. This likely comes as a surprise to few people. As shows like MTV's "My Super Sweet Sixteen" denote, the "it's all about me" element of weddings is now carrying over to other aspects of American culture. Not only that, but being an obnoxiously spoiled teenager or a "Bridezilla" is almost a point of pride. You only get one special day ... or five.

Cynicism aside, I like weddings. I like attending them, and I am genuinely happy for those who find happiness and can make a marriage work. At the same time, I can't help but think that the core essence of marriage - that whole, "to have and to hold, for richer or for poorer", yadda yadda bit - gets lost in the midst of all that tulle. It's an unpopular opinion if talking to a professional cake decorator, a florist, or a jewelry store representative, I imagine, but considering over half of American marriages end in divorce (thanks to my oft-cited source, DivorceRate.org), it seems like there's an awful lot of pomp for very little circumstance. Weddings are a lot of frills with hardly any substance, all under the guise of, "It's every little girl's dream come true!" and, "Well, that's just tradition".

"Tradition", in particular, catches lots of flack. It's the reason people tack onto their hesitations to progress, to change, and not only in regards to marriage. And yet, "traditional marriage" is a phrase that gets tossed around as a guise for society's general distaste for same-sex couples getting hitched. God is tradition, and one interpretation of God is that he doesn't like homos, so tradition is only for straight people. Regardless if one agrees, the fact that a handful of states have now legalized gay marriage, in spite of a nod from "God", makes it clear that tradition has a shelf-life.

Just as marriage can be inclusive of couples consisting of two women or two men, so too can weddings persist without $10,000 dresses and gigantic diamonds. They're nice, don't get me wrong, but they aren't a guarantee that a marriage will be a particularly happy (or sad) one. In this sense, my best advice for soon-to-be brides is to do what feels right, not what other people are pressuring you to do.

I suppose that I am preaching to the choir a bit. My family had traditions amongst itself - my parents would not let my brother and I wake up them up on Christmas morning even a minute before 7 AM to open presents - but generally, we were pretty lax. Though raised Catholic, my folks were not particularly eschewed by religious teachings, nor was there family pressure to pursue a particular career or calling. I was primed for being progressive, for marching to the beat of my own drum, and so it does not particularly feel "wrong" to do this, that, or the other outside of the mainstream. I am also gay, which tends to place me on my own path in a lot of ways. Not only did I not particularly care about planning my fairytale wedding, but I was fairly certain that it wouldn't come to fruition anyways. I liked pretending to be a Disney princess (particularly Ariel), but did not particularly feel like my life was missing anything because I would never be one.

In the advent of Iowa legalizing gay marriage, my partner Sarah and I suddenly had a whole new world (pun intended) availed to us. At the same time, we found that we cared little about the frills of planning a wedding. Our wedding rings were purchased at Wal-Mart, simple white (hers) and yellow gold (mine) bands that I particularly liked because they reminded me of my parents' own rings, pure and uncomplicated. Both sets of parents have been together for 30 years - this was a formula we could get behind. When a friend crowed how beautifully we had photographed them, our hands placed on a fancy-looking marble surface, we just giggled - we'd snapped the camera phone picture in a local Subway sandwich shop.

For us, getting married in and of itself was a novelty - the rest was just gravy. In the early days of wedding discussions, Sarah and I had discussed hopping a plane to California, pre-Prop 8 passing, and baiting our friend Nic to witness us getting hitched by buying her tacos. The officiality of the act was important to us, but I personally cared little about the ceremony. Nonetheless, we made a show of pretending to. We bought coordinating dresses - Sarah's cream with black trim; mine black with a scoop neck. We had our nails done professionally, and touched up our hair and eyebrows. Sarah expressed interest in holding flowers during our Justice of the Peace appointment, so we purchased a cluster of white roses ... only to have my brother - our witness - show up with two dozen more, courtesy of my mother (who was across the country, but had threatened physical violence if the entire ceremony was not video recorded).

In all honesty, we probably spent under $500 total on the entire wedding. After the short ceremony (which we recorded and made copies of, Mom), complete with very personal, self-written vows (our family still gets a kick out of the fact that mine contained the word "douchebag"), we went out for dinner, and then trotted over to the local movie theatre, still dressed in wedding garb. It was wonderful, not because we had successfully pulled it off on a budget and had held off doing what we really WANTED to do, were money no expense; I honestly could not have wanted anything more. Maybe it wasn't traditional, and perhaps we'll never be featured on Lifetime, but getting to call Sarah "my wife" and having it really mean that means more than ten thousand, $10,000 dresses ever will.

I still feel like a Disney princess.