Illustration by Theresa Tibbetts/Getty Images
For more than a month now (more than two months if you’re counting), my editor has been getting on me: “Where’s your groom blog?” My intention was to actually write a report on our progress: like after nailing down a venue, or coming up with a guest list, or picking out the menu.
Now I know. Writing about an engagement is easy. But planning a wedding? That’s hard. I was told by an expert (she was an editor at Martha Stewart Weddings for years—Martha Stewart!) that “everything starts with the venue,” so I tried to concentrate on that. And we had a venue for the ceremony in mind: Maggie really wanted to get married at the Lakewood Cemetery Chapel. I know getting married in a cemetery sounds sort of goth, but Lakewood Chapel’s interior mosaic sparkles with thousands of glass tesserae that were hand-installed by Venetian artisans brought over from Italy in the 19th century, and Maggie is a tilemaker—that’s what she does for a living. Mercedes, the owner of the company she works for, Mercury Mosaics, was married there a couple of years ago. Maggie’s co-worker, Kristen, is getting married at Lakewood next summer, and Maggie was actually nervous about telling her that we were planning to get married at the same spot later in the summer. But we’re yet to put down the deposit with Lakewood, because we haven’t nailed down a venue for the reception. And with our venue for the reception still in the wind—the most important venue for our (to my mother’s chagrin) mainly secular purposes—our commitment to the Lakewood Chapel has remained in limbo. Now it’s September, nearly mid-September, an entire summer has gone by, and we’ve only set a date. We’re planning on getting married September 1, 2018. Woo hoo! Congratulations to us! It’s the Saturday of next Labor Day weekend. But here’s something the zen master asked the padawan: Does setting a date really matter if you don’t have a venue? Because we still don’t have a venue, we still don’t have a guest list, and we still don’t have a menu.
I feel like a failure as a groom blogger.
At the beginning of the summer, we thought this was going to be easy. “We’re just planning a party,” we told ourselves, “and we’ve thrown plenty of parties.” When Maggie and I lived in the North Loop, parties in our loft would just sort of happen. Like Jesus with his proverbial loaves and fishes, after a show at First Avenue, friends would magically appear with a case of beer, or we would break out a strangely unopened bottle of Chartreuse, or we would scavenge a brick of cheese in the refrigerator and crackers in the cupboards. I have the dinkiest bookshelf stereo that I bought at Best Buy in the late '90s, and some of the most talented musicians in Minneapolis would come through, plug their phone into our aux cord, and we would all huddle around my bullshit speakers and a dance party would materialize. What’s a wedding but an afterparty with better booze, better food, and a better speaker system?
And honest to God, the tiny party planter in the ancient reptilian cortex of my brain still believes that’s how this is going to go down: In the next couple of months, we’ll book a spot. With said spot contracted, we’ll cobble together a guest list and call on our friends to help us over the finish line. That’s how we live our lives. But through the prism of a groom blogger, I’m becoming aware that this just isn’t how wedding planning is done. There’s a process here that we’re disrespecting, an entire industry that we’re thumbing our noses at. Will there be repercussions? Will the wedding planning gods smite us? The only real time I feel anxiety about all of this is when my editor asks me about the delivery of my next blog. So my anxiety is a very modern anxiety: it’s anxiety about not having enough anxiety. So on behalf of my editor, I feel like I should interrogate myself: “Why is this so difficult, writing a groom blog?”
One of the contributing factors to our wedding planning indolence, or maybe the central factor, is that we already feel that our wedding planning is infringing on too much of our shared psychic real estate. In some ways, six years in, we’re happier in our relationship than we are with our careers, with our work. So now that we’re engaged, there was an unspoken desire to redirect some of that relationship momentum into the respective parts of each other that have less to do with our No. 1 shared project, which has now been publicly officialized to some extent by our engagement, while not yet going the full nine of our prospective wedding. And full disclosure: Maggie isn’t one of those brides who’s been dreaming of her wedding since she was a little girl. So I’m driving the process—I’m the groom blogger after all—and I’m just ecstatic that I have Maggie for all of time. So pushing wedding planning to the forefront of her plate, when she’s trying to renew her focus on her music career at the same time she’s holding down 40 hours a week as the foreman of a handmade tile factory, seems more than a little silly.
And yet, the world expects us to hear the ticking of the Great Clock. September 1, 2018 is now less than a year away, and we don’t have a venue, we don’t have a guest list, and we don’t have a menu. But I assure you, dear groom blog reader, we know that we want to throw a superior party. We’ve been to two incredible weddings this summer (legit cried at one, danced at both) and we don’t want to waste our friends' and families’ time—we want to bribe them into a lifetime of support in exchange for a memorable celebration. We are committed to the idea of throwing a great wedding. This summer we have thought a lot about what we want, and I promise we are taking this seriously—we just haven’t put enough time into the planning process yet. We know that we want people to eat and we know that we want them to dance. We just don’t know who all of those people are exactly and where they’re going to be doing this eating and dancing. And let’s not even get into what they’ll be eating and what they’ll be dancing to. We have some venue leads, but I think reporting them here would be folly before handshakes have been shook.
Recently, one big development happened: We introduced our families at a dinner at Maggie’s dad and stepmom’s house in Hudson, Wisconsin. There was some anxiety before the meeting on both sides: Would politics get brought up? What about religion? Should every sibling be invited? Would our poodle get mud on their carpet? But in the end, dinner was Bon Appétit–spectacular, everybody got along, and our poodle only jumped on one clean bedspread. Like most things involving parents, it was nerve-wracking in the beginning, enjoyable in the moment, and warmly rewarding now that it’s over. The formal meeting of our families did help to make this wedding stuff feel more real. In retrospect, one thing that made this introduction so easy is the fact that we didn’t spend much time discussing a venue, a guest list, or a menu.
I’ll be back when we have something to report. I promise.
