Once, many years ago, I went shopping for a pair of pants at a downtown department store. I didn’t end up finding anything I liked so I left the store, walking through downtown to my car. It was a cold winter day, but I was dressed warmly, so I couldn’t understand why I was feeling such a draft. After a few minutes, I realized that I was very, very cold in exactly the place I should have been warmest. With a feeling of dread, I looked down to discover that due to a combination of forgetfulness and loose-fitting boxer shorts, I was committing a misdemeanor.
Blushing furiously, I quickly turned away from the street and pressed myself against a building while I readjusted myself. Unfortunately, as I finished doing what I had to do, I realized that I was standing in front of the plate glass window of a travel agency. The gape-mouthed stares of the ladies who worked there haunt me to this day.
I bring up this painful story to make a point – I’m no stranger to embarrassment and humiliation. In other words, I’m well prepared for the wedding process.
A few months ago, when my girlfriend and I decided to get married, we were surprised to discover that we have no taste. We always thought we had taste, but a series of jewelers, bridal consultants and banquet managers have disabused us of that notion. An expensive wedding, we have been informed, is tasteful and will fill our golden years with memories of a perfect experience. What we can actually afford, on the other hand, will burden us with memories of shame and inferiority. Our families will stop loving us.
Read that first paragraph again.
They don’t know who they’re dealing with.
My fiancée and I are fully prepared to endure icy stares, rolled eyes and even sniffs of disapproval at our insistence on paying less for our wedding than we would on a new car. We are aware though, that it won’t be easy. We are up against professionals. The American wedding industry is a multi-billion dollar one built on sneering and the premise that the customer is always wrong.
The sad truth of the matter is, neither of us have any way of knowing whether we are actually wrong or not. As a man, what would I know about weddings? My job is not a particularly demanding one – stand still during the ceremony and remember the words, “I do”. My fiancée is no better off. Through a tragic accident of heredity, she was born without the wedding gene that allows most women to know all the vital details involved in getting married.
For instance:
Did you know that a couple is expected to buy an aisle runner for the floor of the church to be used during the ceremony? Neither of us is particularly observant, but the condition of the floor has always seemed okay to us and besides, wouldn’t that be more of a concern for the church’s building committee anyway?
Bride’s maids’ dresses are supposed to look like that.
Wedding cakes are made with special white butter that is only produced in Europe, presumably by albino cows. This white butter is absolutely necessary if you are going to have perfectly white butter-cream frosting and not the color of butter or cream. This is one reason why a wedding cake is roughly the same price as a flat-screen television. The price is the same, however, even if the icing is pink, because that’s just what wedding cakes cost.
It’s pointless to get excited when you hear bridal people discussing their top choices in tools, because it turns out that they aren’t actually talking about tools at all, but varieties of a fabric called tulle. Who knew?
In a lot of weddings now it is forbidden to throw rice because of the (mistaken) belief that it kills birds. Instead, many ceremonies feature the release of thousands of butterflies as the newly-married couple leaves the church. Aside from any ecological considerations, isn’t a huge, throbbing swarm of insects something that you would pay not to be subjected to?
