Dear reader,
Planning a wedding isn’t for sissies – it’s really not.
The problem is, the planning is left to the sissies; leading to all kinds of avoidable hysteria.
I was sitting on the bed, fiddling with a shoelace that had started to unravel and wishing the day away, when I heard You and Your mother conversing in the sitting room.
“How’s the wedding planning going? Anything set in stone yet?” your mother asked.
“I don’t know, you’ll have to ask Aimee,” I heard You mumble, clearly half distracted by something else.
“Well, that’s not right. You should have a say in the wedding plans too,” Your mother chided.
I paused for a moment, fingers wrapped in the tentacled-string of my shoelace.
Had I purposely left You out of Your own wedding plans?
Surely, Your mother would know – after all, she was planning a wedding too.
In March Your mother had gotten engaged to a man she had known for about six months at the time; and the wedding planning started almost immediately.
They’d be getting married in December of 2019, just a little more than a year after first meeting – and the pastor was already booked.
The engagement ring was scarcely on Your mother’s finger before he moved in with us… You and I had dated for about two years before making “the big move” and living together.
Perhaps just another sign that we were forever lagging behind everybody else.
How then, could I, who had known you for 10 years and had been dating you for four and a half at the time of the engagement, have so little planned?
We are getting married on May 1 of 2020 – by then we’ll have been dating for just under six years – and yet, other than a date and a venue, I really had nothing in place for it yet.
I sighed and stood up as I heard your mother’s car pull out of the garage.
“Am I excluding you? You know, do you feel like I’m not giving you enough of a say about this wedding? I mean, you don’t even know what our flowers will look like – and I’ve already half set my heart on daisies. I just thought, you know, that it’s more than a year away and we probably didn’t need to have everything set in stone yet…”
You looked up from the mountain of high school tests that you were grading (grading in the same sense that Sisyphus was just “rolling” that stone up that hill) and smirked, “As long as you’ll be the one walking down that isle, I couldn’t give less than a damn about the flowers you’ll be holding.”
Perhaps, that’s the point.
You can’t rush love.
In 2015, Emory University researchers Andrew Francis-Tan and Hugo M. Mialon published a study in the journal Economic Inquiry involving 3 000 couples – this study found that dating someone for three years or more before getting engaged reduced that couple’s risk of divorce by 50%. Scientifically, you hardly know someone before you’ve known them for at least three years.
Maybe we’re not wrong for not having everything figured out yet.
Maybe doing things your own way and in your own time isn’t as terrible as Romantic Comedies like The Ugly Truth make it out to be.
After all, life isn’t a romantic comedy movie.
It’s real life.
I know our wedding will be perfect, even if you are surprised by the flower choice on the day.
Wedding planning isn’t for sissies, and I’m the worst sissy of them all.
Anxiously yours,
Aimee.
