Half (ass) Book Report 1: The Wife

The Meaning of Wife: A Provocative Look at Women and Marriage in the Twenty-first Century by Anne Kingston

By page 133 I am enlightened. When I started the wedding planning process over a year ago, the web introduced me to the A Practical Wedding book and blog and the courageous writers who reassured me that I wasn't crazy as I experienced first-hand wedding night freak-out, the reality of family relationships and their place in a real life wedding, the ugly truth about budgeting and the grown-up "gimmies" induced by a serious industry...and how sometimes life really gets in the way of expectations. 

What I didn't expect was regret. My lover and I had great discussions about what we wanted in the wedding, and what we didn't. But I found myself with a bad case of the what-ifs post-wedding. What if we had abstained from sex for a bit before the wedding...would we have had more explosive sexual chemistry during the honeymoon? What if I'd tried on my mother's wedding dress...just for that bride-in-white framed portrait for the wall? What if my husband and I had reserved a special slow song just for us...just to say we did?

Repost: Ask Team Practical: I Hated My Wedding

2013 was the YEAR OF THE WEDDING. And no, we didn't hate our weddings collectively. We did definitely hate 89% of the wedding planning process (sh*t is wack, yo) but the weddings themselves, no! Except...well, except. Execept that some weddings have both highs and lows. And some of us brides end up with icky, bruising stuff happening during the wedding. Stuff that slams us hard down to earth and takes away from the memory and feel of our glowing, joyful ceremonies. 

This article by Liz Moorhead at A Practical Wedding Blog is THE most insightful and healing reaction to a fairly taboo subject: experiencing a disappointing joy-suck of a wedding. 

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Repost: http://apracticalwedding.com/2012/06/how-to-get-over-wedding-disappointment/

ASK TEAM PRACTICAL: I HATED MY WEDDING

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by Liz Moorhead, Contributing Editor

My wedding was over a year ago and while I’m thrilled to be finally married to my husband, I can’t get over my disappointment in my actual wedding day. We put so much energy and time into planning everything, and it still hurts to think about the ways that it didn’t go according to plan and the ways people were hurtful. I know that I should just be happy that we got married, and I feel terrible that I can’t just do that. How do I come to grips with the wedding we had not being the wedding we wanted?

Depressed Over Wedding Nightmare

Dear DOWN,

Don’t beat yourself up for this! Of course you’re upset that things didn’t work out as planned. That’s natural. Wedding magic doesn’t always make that go away. Sometimes it just helps to know you’re not alone. Take, for example, this post on not loving your wedding, or this one, and this one over here. There’s a lot of pressure out there to have the correct feelings about your wedding (and other things, too), and sometimes that’s just one more unrealistic expectation. Not feeling a certain specific way about major life events is okay; many people feel all sorts of different emotions. How can we expect every person to feel the same way regarding the really big things, when we rarely can all agree on the little things? (I honestly just don’t get the mustache trend. There. I said it.) Feelings can be complicated, whether we’re talking about weddings or moving in or changing our names or pregnancy. This pressure to have certain reactions devalues and ignores an entire spectrum of very real and very complex human emotion.

First thing? You need to forgive yourself for being disappointed. Then, you need to allow yourself room to do that. Rather than bottling up that emotion or feeling as though you’re not allowed to express it, let it out. Cry about it. Scream about it. Find a good friend who won’t mind listening to you whine about it. You have to give a wound some air in order to let it heal.

Punished for being the Anti-Bridezilla

who needs this shit?

I learned to say, "NO" thanks to my wedding. Sadly, I didn't learn how to say it effectively until after the caterer bullied me on price, provided unprofessional and substandard service, and then turned around and sued my dad.

There are so many things about the wedding that make me smile fill me with joy. The price of the food and the (piss-poor) quality of the service is something most of the guests didn't notice and I would like my family and close friends to forget. But I don't know how to get over this anger. This blame. This sense that I was not strong enough or smart enough to keep these slimy, unprofessional bloodsuckers on track with our vision for a simple pasta & salad buffet where guests were fed on time, our favorite beer was provided, my brother didn't have to set the tables or plate the cake, and no-one yelled at his mother or our guests to get back to their tables.

Right now I'm pretty angry at myself.

I problem-solve very well. And when the red flags went up, as someone who does events professionally, they were so out of whack from any other vendor I'd worked with previously that there must have been something I wasn't doing right. Was it my fault for not focusing on the caterer more than twice a month, for not tracking them down, for not writing that email sooner, for not insisting on a copy of the signed contract, for using words that I thought were clear but clearly weren't clear because clearly something was still missing, etc, etc...? When I spent three whole months confused about how much were were cutting the check for, and made a spreadsheet to track their budget line items, and then played phone tag for two months, and remained confused and in a state of sticker-shock...that was the time to quit. To stop playing with the mean children. To find a beer caterer and order pizza and live in debt-free post-wedding bliss.

We had a contract. And I wasn't interesting in being (labeled) a bridezilla. So I didn't pitch a fit. I didn't lay down the law of "this is MY wedding and we're doing this timeline MY way". I used reason, a lot of it. I used logic...completely wasted logic, FYI. This company had decided our wedding was their next Monopoly win and they weren't interested in playing in my budgetary playpen.

It didn't occur to me to STOP. Pushback. Shout NO from rafters or pay/appoint an intermediary who would have been more of an asshole direct with them to do so in my stead. Why didn't it occur to me?! While I was patting myself on the back about being level-headed despite the stress and the angst and the creeping sense of powerlessness, they must have been laughing at how easy it was to wring out that extra $X,XXX.xx.

update: Why didn't I check the Better Business Bureau before I contracted with them? The complaints already on there say it all! If any fellow Soon-to-be-Marrieds out there planning on getting married in the Fort Drum area that BBB link is for you! I can't recommend my caterer enough. Really, can't.

Top 10 Things Every Army-Bride-to-Be Ought to Know...and Why

Why? Because we freakin' <3 lists. And because we wish we'd known all of this all anywhere from 1-60 months ago. Being raised by hippie feminists, educated by women's colleges and women's studies classes, informed by Jezebel.com, cultured by big cities and traveling the globe creates well-rounded individuals. One might even say round pegs for the square hole of the US Armed Forces. And yeah, we had a couple o'gaps in our zeitgeist that we hope we can help you with.

and goes there...and then over there...

In no particular order:

1. A is for Alpha, N is for November, P is for Papa, V is for Victor...one needs to know the Military Alpha-Bravo, I mean, Alphabet. Why? Because no-one will be able to spell your (new) *mutually hyphenated* last name in the Army without using it and you will look like a tool if you can't do the same. Here's a hot tip. Get on Netflix.com TM or Hulu.com TM and watch The Dollhouse. All the Dolls have call-signs in the Military Alphabet; NOVEMBER sex plots + Joss Whedon = LEARNING! Or download this Militaryspot.com article on the formula and history of the Military Alphabet to your Smart House touch-screen wall and have it follow you around reciting itself. Whichever works for you. 
2. Crest 3D Whitestrips TM really work. And no, I'm not a corporate whore. Drink water- in fact, start the day with a giant travel cup of Jasmine Green tea (steeped 10-12 minutes). Exfoliate often but be gentle with your skin. Find a moisturizer you love and use it EVERY night on your face and neck. Or as often as you can manage. Moisturizing your face at night is important to the future of the planet... or at the very least, the ability to have male clerks in most stores within 10 miles of Post goggle and look visibly shocked when they find out you're 10 years older than 23. With no make-up on. Wear confidence instead of make-up, do push-ups when you're feeling down, and when you need an ego-boost go out on the town with no bra in a t-shirt and watch the strangers drool with lust and envy.
   Now whose scared of walking down an aisle in front of people who already love you? Damn right, nobody. You're welcome. 
3. Consider getting married before your wedding. We did a poll and 97% of all military couples we spoke to were legally married before they had a wedding. Now for full disclosure that's a sample size of 3 plus a >3% margin of error. So yeah, we all did it. Not a one of us planned to have two wedding "dates"...and where Bravo thinks of her wedding date as her anniversary, Kilo thinks of the marriage date as the anniversary. One of us is in the closet about it. Why? Because families are strange. Oh, why did we get married before we got married? Simple.
   Continued after the jump »