The Wedding Waitlist: a Campaign for a Tradition We Need

When Matt and I first got engaged, the first thing my more experienced married friends who had been through this before and were lovingly pretending to be excited for me instead of laughing in my face because soon I would have to have a very strong opinion about things like what color shoes my bridesmaids should wear suggested that we start by making our guest list before we did anything else. The idea being that if you know how many people are coming to your wedding and who they are, it will be easier to plan everything else. This is great advice. It's also, apparently, impossible.

Matt and I are now roughly 5 months into wedding planning and we still haven't finished a guest list. I didn't realize deciding who was coming to my wedding would be so hard but it's terrible. I feel like a really mean varsity volleyball coach, cutting people left and right. Who expects they will be invited to the wedding? Will I hurt someone's feelings if they were expecting an invite and it never came? Am I being self-centered to think anyone would be disappointed if they weren't invited? What is the optimal number of people to invite to ensure there will be leftover cake?

The hard thing is, since everyone knows I'm getting married, pretty much everyone I talk to wants to talk about the wedding. It's an easy topic, and lots of people want to share their advice. I talk about it with co-workers, acquaintances, people I haven't talked to in years who have messaged me on Facebook to give me the low down on things they learned when they got married. And its great! One thing I actually like about being a bride-to-be is that it's ability to connect me with people I haven't talked to in a while. But then it makes it extra weird when I realize I've been talking to these people about my wedding, but it's likely I can't actually invite them to my wedding. It always goes back to that Excel document, with the "invited" column and the "Mom's friends it's important I invite because they invited her to their daughter's wedding" (which keeps growing suspiciously longer and longer) column and then the "maybe" column. The sad "maybe" column where people I genuinely like but maybe haven't talked to much since college are hanging out with someone I went to summer camp with or that guy Matt knows from work who he only really talks to when they bump into each other at a vending machine but he's super funny.

So here's my idea: weddings should be allowed to have a waitlist. You know when you apply to college and you get waitlisted and you just have to wait for other people to say no but once there's room, you get to move in. When you send out Save the Dates, you should also be allowed to send out waitlist notices. I mean they'd be really nice like "Hey, I really like you but you there are physically not enough chairs at my wedding for everyone I want to come so you're on deck, I'll let you know." Personally, I would not be offended by this because remember, these would be people you wouldn't be inviting at all otherwise. What's more offensive, just never hearing from someone who you thought you might be invited to their wedding or being pleasantly surprised that you maybe can go to their wedding if several of their relatives and closer friends have other stuff to do that day? In fact, you could even tell waitlisted people, "don't worry, you're off the hook for gifts". It's a win-win situation. And once it was a cultural norm, nobody would think it was weird.

Unfortunately nobody wants to be the one to start the waitlisting both because it's an idea I just made up and because you will look like a jerk, so I'm proposing that if you are a person who I'm sort of close with but maybe not close enough with you that you want me to watch you dance with your new husband/wife to an Ed Sheeran song and throw a bunch of flowers at some unmarried women, then please, waitlist me. I volunteer as tribute to be the first ever waitlisted wedding guest. Then maybe one day we can live in a world where waitlisting wedding guests is as normal as other wedding traditions like throwing a piece of the bride's underwear at a group of grown men or shoving baked goods into each's others faces. Long live the wedding waitlist.

Wedding Stages or How I Remembered I Have to Plan a Wedding

As far as I can tell, wedding planning goes in stages. The first stage: panic. About 3 and a half hours after we got engaged I had the realization that I’d never planned anything bigger than a fourth of July barbecue where we decided to buy a keg for about twenty people and then drank maybe a quarter of it and Matt, his roommate and I spent the next two weeks drinking VERY warm beer with every meal. So this gives you an idea of my planning abilities. But suddenly, I realized we had to plan an entire night with food, dancing, speeches, a legally binding ceremony, and intricate floral design and this led to the aforementioned panic. It didn’t matter that the wedding was likely over a year away, we had to know every single thing now. Who will put on the tablecloths? How does a sound system work? Is it possible to grow our own flowers because like they just grow in the ground from seeds and why doesn’t Matt think it’s important that we discuss napkin color and oh my god, my arms are looking kind of chubby, should I be doing push ups right now, I’ll just do push ups right now while I Google “Where do you get a marriage certificate?” The panic was overwhelming. It led to a lot of frustrating phone calls with my parents (who assumed parental panic mode, in which they panicked about all the things I forgot to panic about and then we yelled at each other for not properly allocating our respective panics.) and fighting with Matt who clearly had no idea about anything wedding related at all like had he even ever been to a wedding how could we get married if he once mentioned offhand that he might not even need to buy a new suit for the wedding and didn’t realize there were different types of lilies?

The panic subsided, though, after we booked a venue and picked a date. It disappeared like a magicians rabbit, for all accounts gone except we knew it was still somewhere, out of sight, to be dealt with later. But for a little while we were impressed with the trick, so we happily moved on to the next stage: completely forgetting that a wedding was occurring altogether. For the next few weeks/maybe months we spent zero effort or time planning the wedding and kind of just assumed things would work out eventually. This was a much more fun stage than planning. We barely talked about the wedding except in imagining it was a fun event we’d get to attend sometime in the future: who would give a speech, could we do karaoke afterwards, would it still be warm enough to walk outside on the beach the day before? It was a blissful stage, when people asked about our wedding plans and I’d respond as if they were asking if I was planning to go to the farmer’s market later to pick up plums: “Oh, we aren’t sure yet, we’ll just see what happens”. But all good things must come to an end.

The denial stage ended with actual wedding dress shopping in which I could not deny that everything lacy and long and white looks almost nothing like it does online on my actual body and with that the wedding seemed real again.

We’ve now entered what I’ll call the “plum pudding” stage. Remember when you took biology in high school and you had to learn about all the models of an atom scientists had proposed over time and there was that one model called the plum pudding model and you were like A. What is plum pudding? This is America, can we please use a term relevant to our own cultural desserts? And then you were told that a plum pudding model of an atom is atom that has electrons scattered around it like the plums of a plum pudding which, by the way, is a cake and not  pudding at all and can we just call it a chocolate chip cookie model here in America where pudding is a gloppy, viscous liquid dessert incapable of supporting plums? Anyway, that’s where we are now, in a plum pudding of panic. Tiny negatively charged pockets of freaking out are surrounded by a positively charged background of assuming everything will be okay. Things will be perfectly fine until I suddenly realize it’s extremely important we figure out a wedding hashtag right now, loudly, in front of this coffee shop where we happen to be standing or the wedding will implode immediately.

But actually when I say “we” are in this stage, I mean me. (Ugh, I’m already doing the annoying thing where a married person refers to themselves and their spouse as “we” like they’ve symbiotically attached to each other and are now sharing blood and essential nutrients and opinions about window treatments. Kill me now.) Matt is in his own stage, a stage more like the regular model of an atom: he’s the nucleus, calm, balanced, neutral. Thoughts about the wedding are swirling around him like electrons, never touching him but are still there, orbiting around, ready to form covalent bonds with my wedding thoughts if only I could get those electrons out of my nucleus.

But we’re not even halfway through all this wedding stuff and who know how many stages there are ahead.  I don’t know which will come next, hopefully one where we get around to hiring a caterer. Or at least finally think of the perfect hashtag. (Suggestions welcome.) But either way, time keeps moving on and despite the new blanket of snow we just got this morning, next October is starting to feel menacingly close. Hold on to your potatoes, Dr. Jones.

Pinterest or How I Decided to Have a Ghost-Free Wedding

People keeping asking to see my Pinterest.

It's a question I never got before I was engaged. In fact, I would say I'd never, out loud, discussed my Pinterest account with anyone, ever before a little blue ring adorned my left hand. I do have one, I got one a few years ago and posted a few things and then kind of forgot about it. But once I got engaged my Pinterest became a sort of passport of proof to others that I had in my head an idea of at least, like, what a wedding looked like. Several friends asked to see it and when I went back to my sad, out of date Pinterest account, it soon became clear that other women I knew had already been planning their wedding on Pinterest, women who weren't even engaged, women who weren't even in a serious relationship. I suddenly felt incredibly behind. Once again, I didn't know the wedding rules, didn't know what the hell I was supposed to be doing when, and once again I felt completely overwhelmed by the whole thing and asked Matt how bad it would be to just run off to Vegas, a request which gets a little bit more serious every time I suggest it.

And then, when I booked an appointment to try on a wedding dress (my first wedding dress was purchased online, excitedly, alone, and under the influence of red wine, but sadly it didn't work out due to an unforeseen sequin problem.) the form I had to fill out asked two questions I felt completely unprepared to answer. One: What is your wedding aesthetic? I wrote "I'd like there to be onion rings." (Again with the red wine.) Two: Please link your Pinterest board. I panicked. I had actually created a wedding pinterest board but it only had about four actual things posted on it. The problem is, every time I try to go on Pinterest to find actual wedding ideas, I get distracted with the insane wedding ideas that other people on Pinterest think are good ideas and post them on a different Pinterest board titled "Insane Wedding Ideas People on Pinterest Think are Good Ideas". This is much more fun to me than actual wedding Pinteresting, and as a result I accidentally end up spending all my time doing this and eventually end up no closer to having a real live wedding and confusing bhldn.com greatly about my "wedding aesthetic".

But for you, dear readers, for your pleasure, and because I'm terrible at the actual planning part of planning a wedding (I imagine I'll be just darling at the dancing and listening to speeches and wearing a pretty dress and  drinking champagne part) I would like to share with you the most fun part of Pinteresting: Insane Wedding Ideas People on Pinterest Think are Good Ideas.

1. Photos of Dead People on Chairs

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/103442122668706218/

A popular pin I've seen going around is to put photos of your loved ones who have passed in frames on chairs and then place those chairs within the rest of the chairs as if the dead people are attending your wedding. Aside from the obvious creepiness, wedding chairs cost like, 4 dollars a guest (I think, as you might remember, it is impossible to get anyone to reveal the price of chairs). There is no way I'm paying money so relatives who have already died can have a seat at my wedding. They can float up above in the clouds with all the rest of the dead people who feel like attending (Dorothy Parker, Julia Child, I'm looking at you.) Chairs are for living people with butts and forward bending knees. If the dead relatives have a problem with that they can haunt me like normal dead people who don't make ludicrous demands that I save them a front row seat at my nuptials.

2. Gather Your Family in a Heart Shape and Take a Photograph of it From Above

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/103442122668706243/

No. I won't. There's an open bar at this wedding there is no time to be arranging human beings into shapes found in a box of Lucky Charms.

3. This Pin with 84 Ways to Use Antlers in Your Rustic Wedding

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/103442122669205770/

Who are you, Gaston from Beauty and the Beast? Eighty-four different ways? That's really an impressive amount of ways to use the horns of a probably deceased animal in your wedding. Before I saw this pin I had thought of exactly zero ways antlers would fit into my wedding. Although, I looked through this gallery and like 79 of the ways are to just put antlers on a table, so don't get too excited.

4. Have Your Groom Write a Message on Your Shoe

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/103442122669205702/

So you never forget the one to two generic sentences about love you forced him to write on the bottom of your shoe which will likely rub off roughly halfway through your wedding.

5.  This Time-Lapsed Photo of You and Your Husbands Walking Towards Each Other Where You Look Like Ghosts

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/103442122669205724/

The entire article this pin references is titled "75 Must-Have Photos With Your Groom". I did not feel the need to have any of them, however this time-lapsed photo was the most ridiculous. It looks like the two people in the photo entered some kind of Casper-esque pact where they turned from ghosts into real people when they shared their first kiss. Unless that is actually what is happening here, in which case, okay fine.

So I'm pretty much still at square one with Pinterest, but what's that saying about old boyfriends? That you learn what you like by eliminating what you don't like? At least I can now be sure my bridal bouquet won't include antlers and my wedding will be a strictly ghost-free zone.

Disappointment and The Secret of the Chairs

Matt and I finally nailed down a date and venue for our wedding. But it wasn't our first choice. Our first choice was renting a giant beach house where we could have everything: the wedding, the rehearsal dinner, a honeymoon after the wedding, and a place for all of our bridal party stay. But one of the first things I've learned about wedding planning is that whatever you want, it's probably not going to happen the way you want it. This feeling, for me, can be overwhelming, and sometimes it makes me not want to plan a wedding at all. As I scan through photos on websites of perfect table settings, models wearing long lacey dresses that don't give them weird armpit fat at all, decorations that look like Martha Stewart personally came over and crafted herself, I know that not all of the things I might get excited about will turn out the way I want them. The house was one of them: in the end there were disputes over the contract with the owner (Personally I think asking the owner to put a line in the contract that the house, which was currently under construction, would actually be built by the time we stayed there, was not being unreasonable, but she seemed to think so.) and we didn't sign. But instead we booked a very nice place that is not a house, but I'm sure will be great. And like, guaranteed to not have any gaping holes between rooms or exposed ceiling beams.

We were glad, though, that we booked a place that did have some things included, which the beach house wouldn't have. For instance chairs and tables, which are beyond frustrating to try and rent. It's like this big secret how much chairs cost. Nobody will tell you. We looked at website after website (which all looked like they were made in 1997 on expage.com) trying to figure out just a general cost for renting enough tables and chairs but the prices were never anywhere to be found. I've found that's how it is with wedding stuff in general: nobody lists their prices. I guess you're not supposed to care because its like your "big day" and all expenses shouldn't matter, but dear god, I've been trying for two weeks to get a caterer to reveal to me how much it would costs to feed 150 people pasta and I cannot get her to tell me. Unless you want to buy a "Wedding package", getting prices out of vendors is basically like trying to solve all of those booby traps Indiana Jones has to go through to get to the Holy Grail. Vendors love to list prices for their "Wedding packages" which usually include things you didn't even know you needed at your wedding: fondue fountains, valet parking, decorative chalkboards, chandeliers, someone to softly serenade you with "Bridge Over Troubled Water" while you get your make up done, etc. In general, planning a wedding is like jumping into a whole new insane world I never knew existed, full of people who insist your marriage will never last unless you purchase topiary shaped like your busts. My favorite vendor I've come across is a company that just rents out mismatched old fashioned plates, because every wedding I've ever been to I've been like "this wedding fine I guess but I can't believe I have to eat off this stupid plain white plate." I'm not sure how much the mismatched antique plates cost because of course there are no prices listed on their website, but I assume its an outrageous amount of money.

But for now, we've kind of put a hold on all planning. We have a place, we have a date, we just had our -1 year anniversary yesterday. (We decided peanut butter ice cream was the -1 year anniversary gift). The truth is, before I got engaged, I'd never spent too much time thinking about what I wanted for my wedding anyway, so any disappointments along the way are not really going to be that much of a let down.  Even though things will likely never be perfect, nor will we ever find out how much pasta costs, it's going to probably be okay.

Ok fine, I kind of want the mismatched plates.

F*ck Burlap

Have you ever imagined what you want adorning the tables at your wedding? Let me guess. It’s rustic. It’s brown. It’s scratchy and loosely woven and it is the same material used to make bags to carry large amounts of potatoes. That’s right: it’s burlap.

Burlap is everywhere in the world of wedding decorations. Burlap table runners. Burlap wraps around centerpieces. Burlap wall hangings. And I just want to say, and please pardon my language, but: fuck burlap. I have no intention of having anything that can also be used to carry children in sack races to the finish line at an elementary school field day in my wedding. Burlap is everything that’s wrong with weddings: it’s ugly, it should be incredibly cheap because it’s an actual packing material, and yet it’s everywhere and it’s super expensive. If you search for “table runners” on Etsy, 80% of what comes up with be burlap. Sometimes it will be straight up strips of burlap that some jerk is trying to sell you because they cut it into a rectangle and sometimes it’s fancy burlap that some jerk has sewed lace onto even though lacy potato bag as a decorating theme makes no sense whatsoever. If it were up to Etsy, entire weddings would just be 100 percent burlap. The bride would walk down the aisle on a burlap carpet. All weddings would be held in old potato packing plants around stacks and stacks of burlap. The guests would just be burlaps sacks with faces painted on them.

In general, “rustic” is the thing in weddings right now and I 100 percent don’t get it. Weddings are supposed to be fancy. You’re suppose to drink champagne and wear a dress for 4 and a half hours that costs more than your rent, not eat food in places where cows live and serve cake on cut up pieces of logs.

Look, I’m mostly joking. There are a million picture on Pinterest of barn weddings that are actually really pretty, but the main problem for me is that unless you happen to know someone who owns a picturesque barn big enough to hold 200 people, it doesn’t cost any less to have your wedding in a literal barn than it does to have your wedding in a fully enclosed, insulated indoor location with flushable toilets. And then there’s insane things like this, which is an actual table made of hay, which in case you've forgotten, is horse food:

If a single piece of hay touches me at my wedding, I’m going home.

Anyway, there will be no burlap at our wedding. Except my custom made burlap wedding dress, which I recently bought on Etsy.

I Can't Wait to Construct the Perfect Facebook Post About Marrying my Very Close Acquaintance

It happened. After seven and a half years of dating my boyfriend I now have a bunch of shiny rocks adorning my left hand that signify our pending nuptials. I said yes and he said yes in a very complicated, unplanned double proposal that involved a secluded beach at sunset, a picnic, and red wine given to us by strangers that we drank directly from the bag. It’s what every girl dreams of. And it happened to me.

Perhaps I will document the story of our double proposal in a later post, but for now I want to talk about the most important part of getting engaged: the engagement Facebook post.

The first thing my mother told my boyfriend when he told her he was going to propose to me was “Don’t let Lucy post it on Facebook right away”. Of course, she knows me too well, there’s nothing I crave more than innumerable likes on clever Facebook statuses, and the engagement post is the ultimate like-generating machine. The engagement post produces obligatory likes from people you forgot existed: that guy a few grades below you in high school you were in a Midsummer Night’s Dream with, that French guy who lived in your dorm when you studied abroad and was always stealing your pasta and then pretending he didn’t speak English when you confronted him about it, a girl you went to camp with who now seems to be way more successful than you and you probably shouldn’t have clicked on her profile at all,  does she seriously have four horses and is a professional ballerina, ugh what are you doing with your life? The point is, unlike birthdays which happen every year, or graduations which can happen multiple times in your life, or engagements are ideally a one-time deal which means pretty much everyone you know is generally obligated to at the very least press “like” on your engagement post. Besides the “I’ve produced a baby” post, they are probably the most attention a normal-non celebrity person can get on social media. For a few days you, just a dumb nobody who tricked someone into thinking they want to live with you for eternity, get to feel like Taylor Swift feels every time she posts anything on Twitter.

Since I’m almost 28 years old, 40-60% of my Facebook newsfeed at any given time is proposal announcements. I’ve boiled them down into a several categories that I could choose from.

1. Playing it safe

The most common type of Facebook engagement announcement. We’ve all seen this one before, the close up of the ring on the finger. The text usually reads something like “I said yes!” or “She said yes!” Then, of course, there must be mention of “marrying your best friend.” God forbid anyone this day and age marries just someone they are in love with. It’s not enough. The truth is my fiance Matt is my friend that I probably like the best, which is one thing I like about our relationship. We watch the same shows, we gossip about everyone we know (probably you), we are really good at picking out snacks for road trips. But he’s not my best friend, he’s a dude I love and live with and get along with super well. If we weren’t doing all these things, we shouldn’t be getting married in the first place. A best friend is the person you go to to complain about your relationship and they nod approvingly and buy you wine. No fiance in the history of the world nods approvingly while you complain about them. It’s just a totally different title. I like to think of Matt as my fiance, my roommate, and like, a very close acquaintance. But I am very excited to be marrying my very close acquaintance!

The ring pic, while cliche, does serve a purpose. It’s proof. You did it! You have a hand! And plus, Matt and I double proposed on the same day by accident, so we both had rings to show off which felt fair and feminist and most importantly, corroborated our story.

2. The Extremist

This post is more rare, but documented: the photo of the actual proposal. Full disclosure, I was absolutely terrified of two things happening if Matt proposed, which contributed to my wanting to be the one who proposed in the first place: 1. He would get down on one knee. 2. There would be other people around. Luckily for me, neither of these things occurred so this type of post was not an option. For me, I didn’t want Matt to get down on one knee because it felt weird. It’s not like Matt regularly asks me things while on bended knee, he’s never gotten on the floor of our kitchen and been like, “Would you like me to buy more milk while I’m at the grocery store today?”  and I wanted the proposal to feel like our real life. I’m sure most people disagree and are more traditional, but the idea of a bended knee proposal felt fake and archaic and it did not reflect our much more modern-feeling relationship (I don’t want to brag about subverting gender roles but like, we both cook and clean in this house) and I really, really didn’t want it.

As for there being other people around, I once went to this play, a Shakespeare in the park kind of thing, and one of the guys running it proposed to his girlfriend while on stage at intermission. In movies, when people propose in public there’s clapping and cheering and tears, but in real life, everyone was mostly confused. What was happening? We couldn’t really hear what he was saying. She looked mad. He looked embarrassed. Some people clapped purely out of either politeness or just to move the whole thing along so we could get back to the Merry Wives of Windsor and pretend this never happened. I never wanted this to happen to me.

I certainly did not want a candid photo of the event: I have enough trouble making human-looking faces in photos I'm ready for, I definitely did not want my double-chinned surprised face documented for the world to see.

3. The Fun Minimalist

Some proposal posts are so brief, you can blink and miss them. Was it even a proposal post at all? Just a brief mention of marriage and a flash of two happy faces. These posts are subtle and tasteful. Sometimes they are even funny and enjoyable to read. The people who post these kinds of posts are usually people who actually like each other a lot and don’t really care about how many people like their posts, they’re just excited that they are engaged to someone they love. These posts do not rack up the kind of likes I needed to effectively use the internet as a way to feel a sense of worth and importance as a person, so obviously this was out.

In the end, we settled on a ring pic of both of our rings, a lovely shot of the sun setting over the lake and a brief description of what happened. We respectfully told our family and close friends over the phone first and posted it a few days after the proposal itself, but that was mostly because we were camping and had no access to internet. It was a great success. We got like, 500 likes. We did not accept them gracefully, we sat on the couch watching them pour in and fought over who had more friends represented. We speculated on if we were getting more likes than other engaged couples. We basked in the glow of internet fame for a few days, clicking those little red bubbles as soon as they appeared and collecting name after name. It felt good. Also, we were excited about being engaged and spending the rest of our lives together. But oh, those sweet, sweet likes.