Wedding Frenzy

How one Coast staffer's wedding planning transformed from blissful apathy to sheer panic.

I could tell you about the Big Mac and fries we ordered at the drive-through after our wedding, or how my credit card got denied at the hotel, or how I spilled dark beer all over my white (no, ivory) dress before I even set foot on the dance floor. But that was after. This is the story of before.

To my best recollection, the day was a red-hued blur of silk and roses that began alone, impatiently, bikini-clad under the hot mid-afternoon sun. I was getting married, a fact I reminded my nebulous mind of intermittently, hoping that one of those times would provoke some kind of cosmic reaction, or at least acknowledgement, of this, one of life’s most expectant moments. Was this what most women did on their wedding day? Lie by a pool, staring up at the infinite blue sky, expecting to feel something meaningful? Wait for a small, but significant stir of the guts that would communicate that this day was, in fact, special?

Of course, I’d been thinking of it for at least a year. The thought had brought me to highs of elation and pits of melancholy on a number of occasions, driving home from work or folding laundry or grocery shopping. A well-timed comment had the ability to mesmerize me in optimistic, everlasting romance; an ill-placed one, the power to reduce me to fits of tears. I had envisioned the event in all its many, complex layers of emotion and promises of hopeful married bliss. I had thought of the wedding as doubt’s ruthless executioner, as a perfect culmination to the imperfect road to getting there, finally, at last. I had thought about all of this, and yet, the details, the logistics, had entirely eluded me.

Yes. Despite all of these raw and unformed – poetic – dreams, I hadn’t even remotely considered colors, venues or themes, guest lists or seating charts. Anemones, I thought, were a kind of predatory water dwelling animal; turns out, they’re flowers, too, the ones I liked that weren’t in season for a September wedding. More things I didn’t know. “Flower balls,” those hanging, circular bouquets, have a name: pomanders, of all things, and letterpress and embossing are modern methods of inscribing invitations, not archaic stamping rituals by candlelight. One day, staring at a 10-foot-tall wall of colored and oddly shaped paper for invitations, I teetered on a nervous breakdown, struggling to comprehend the intricacies of inner and outer envelopes, RSVP card verbiage and script versus type fonts. I ended up buying $300-worth of “luxe” paper, which, for three months, mocked me from a bag in my trunk. 

The truth was that when it came to actually planning a wedding, I was woefully and embarrassingly unequipped and inexperienced. I had not fantasized about a fairytale wedding since I was six years old, nor was I the type-A person who ordered color swatches two years in advance to make sure that the napkins wouldn’t clash with the bridesmaids’ dresses. When the wedding planner asked what kind of theme I was envisioning for our September wedding, I stared blankly, a deer caught in the headlights – or the dreaded spotlight – of impending bridedom. Translation: I have no idea. Or, better, pleading: Please do it for me.

Color schemes and talk of musical genres were enough to send me into a hazy confusion, a place where nothing made any sense, least of all how many vases I wanted on each table, and were those tables round or rectangular? Worse yet, in my indecisive state, I started to care – about the guest book, about the favors, about the flowers – only I had no idea what I wanted or how to communicate it even if I did. Eventually, I began to struggle to maintain my calm demeanor; I started to feel the solid pillars of sheer indifference weaken and initiate an excruciating disintegration, crumbling into a ruinous heap of defeated nonchalance. Was I being – had I already been – sucked unknowingly into the world of chiffon and gift registries? I had refused to become one of those brides – the kind who agonize over shades of beige and lose sleep over paper stock – but some of the signs were surfacing like sunspots after a glowing summer tan. I bought not one, but two wedding dresses and interviewed at least a dozen officiants, searching for the one who would capture just so the essence of Frankie’s and my relationship while simultaneously being generic enough to please a widely varying palette of spiritual beliefs. When I was referred to someone who seemed promising, he inexplicably seemed to think I wanted a ceremony in Spanish and insisted on calling me “Yessica.” Was I being too picky? I wondered. And Frankie’s wedding ideas, while politely tolerated, began to become more and more irksome, not fitting into my admittedly rudimentary, but highly fantastical vision of the day. The one about wearing a kilt to honor my father’s Scottish upbringing was good-natured, but my dad isn’t the type to embrace cultural symbols or impart niceties. A terse e-mail from my dad quoting Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary followed. “Kilt, n. A costume sometimes worn by Scotchmen in America and Americans in Scotland.”

As the day grew nearer, muddled ideas had to be fine-tuned into concrete decisions, a sort of “no going back” zone that reeked of finality. I thought of all the various metaphors I had encountered during my interim wedding planning phase alluding to the modern tendency to launch oneself entirely into preparations so as to avoid thinking about the more profound and presumably lengthy marriage. I wondered if I had been deluding myself by thinking that I had most certainly not fallen prey to that trap, that wearing an ivory dress and sparkly shoes was not what the day was about. I thought about all of this by the pool and then the day was gone, vanished in a bright white flash, far too quickly.

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