The Engaged Wedding Guest
I’m going to my cousin’s wedding this weekend. I’ve come to realize that an engaged person is the most dangerous type of wedding guest. We cannot be trusted to simply enjoy the open bar and reconnect with the family or friends we’ve been thrust upon. We are analysts. We are nit-pickers. We are judges.
OK, maybe I’m a little rash in using the first person plural. Maybe the average bride-to-be goes to weddings during her engagement and is as gracious as the next guest. Maybe you’re reading this thinking, “Wow, that Robin is a self-centered brat.” Or maybe you know EXACTLY what I mean, and your experiences as a wedding guest who is in the midst of planning her own wedding have prompted one of these classic reactions:
Holy $pendoli. A Broke-Ass Bride learns early on in her wedding planning process just how expensive every little bit of a wedding can be. Going to a wedding while planning a wedding can turn your mental image of the reception tableau into a catalogue spread. You’ll hallucinate price quotes next to every last detail, and do quick mental math that produces heart-stopping figures estimating the total budget.
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D-I-AY-AY-AY! Before you’ve gone down the rabbit hole of planning your own wedding, handmade wedding details probably seem charming and quaint. But once you’ve signed on for your own do-it-yourself projects, and watched them gather dust in your living room corner, anyone else’s completed crafts can send you into a punishing shame spiral. One how-to on the Internet can make a nervous DIY bride break out into a cold sweat. So coming face-to-face with an entire wedding of crushingly creative crafts? It’s enough to make a delinquent DIY bride throw a gin and tonic in her own face to camoflauge her suddenly-flowing tears of panic.
Wedding Zen-vy, or it’s flipside, Bridenfreude. If you’re a neurotic nutball like me, one of your biggest fears about your wedding day is that your anxiety will crowd out all other emotions. So seeing a perfectly serene, beamingly happy bride as an engaged wedding guest can inspire a bit of envious wonder. How is she so calm? Is she on drugs? She must be on drugs. Conversely, a bride who jitters her way down the aisle and looks like she might faint once she reaches the altar can provoke the engaged wedding guest to feel incredibly cruel relief. I’m sure I can hold myself together better than THAT display of bridal panic. Maybe my hands will shake, but at least MY ushers won’t be taking bets on whether I vomit on the ring bearer. Sure, it’s not nice to take solace in the pain of others, but the engaged wedding guest can’t be trusted to be nice.
So have any of you gone to a wedding during your engagement? Was it just another wedding for you, or can you admit to falling into one of these patterns of thinking?
-Robin
My fiance and I went to a wedding right after we first got engaged and if anything it helped us see that we should stop stressing about the really small details. The day goes by SO quickly (honestly, it flew by even for us so I can't imagine how fast it went for the bride and groom) that we realized a normal guest (i.e. not a crazy-nit-picky-engaged guest) doesn't necessarily notice all the little details that you stressed out about before the wedding. No one really cares what the escort table looks like or whether you picked the most expensive linens possible…Instead, everyone is focused on two things: the bride and the groom (and eating – let's be real guests are much happier when they're well fed!)
I've been to three weddings in my life – one as a nine year old, and then two while I myself was engaged. It was nice to see what non-planning folks anticipated out of a wedding before we got too deep into crafting our own. It was also quite nice to see what can be done on different budgets (one was your average $30,000 wedding and looked it, another was a $5000 that was just simple and quaint).
Our biggest issue was not talking about our own wedding while we were there! We felt it might be rude and look like we were trying to outshine the couple, but somehow someone always managed to get us talking about it. Very true though, Amanda, it really opened my eyes to just how short a wedding feels when you spend so much time planning it.
We went to my cousin's wedding right before we got engaged (the discussion was on the front burner at that moment) and it gave us a very good idea of what we did and didn't want. Hers was a very lavish, expensive, traditional wedding, which doesn't suit either of our personalities at all. In fact, I think the only thing she had that we wanted was the open bar. Ha. But it certainly gave us a jumping-off point as to which direction we wanted to go in, which made the planning that much easier once he actually did pop the question. We weren't nit-picky because we were in the baby-baby stages of planning, but we did discuss a lot of it and figured out the general feel of what we wanted as a result of attending hers.
We've been engaged for almost 4 years, and in that time we've been engaged we've been to no fewer than 15 weddings (with four more this summer!). At first I was in awe of it all, but now it's more of a note-taking process. "Oh, I love this cake flavor", or "Ew, remind me not to do THAT on my invitations." I could plan my entire wedding by now just based on other people's hits and misses!
I totally agree with this. Every time I've been to a wedding since getting engaged, I feel like I'm on that TLC show Four Weddings. I can't help it!
Four Weddings is the first thing that came to my mind too. I'm not engaged yet but every girl dreams about their wedding day. The last wedding my boyfriend and I attended made us both realize what we did and didn't want. At the very least, we both realized we were on the same page. BTW… LOVE the Ikea setup photo above =)
I will be going to one this year and a bunch next year all before my wedding….one of them is 4 months before mine and it's my future brother-in-law. Me and his fiance had a little bit of a bride war over the date…..she won. Also, she has parents that are helping her pay for it and I don't, therefore has a bigger budget than me and can basically have everything I wanted that I won't have. Although I am now happy with our winter wedding date which has been our aniiversary date for 5 years, still not sure how I'm going to enjoy going to their wedding on the date and budget I can't have.
I have thoroughly enjoyed the weddings I have attended since becoming engaged, but I do find myself thinking (semi-regularly) "Well, we're not doing THAT at our wedding." Thankfully, just as regularly, I have thought "Hmmm, I'll have to find a way of using that idea without looking like I'm copying"