Say Yes to the Dress

There's not much on the telly on lazy Sunday mornings, so I found myself watching Say Yes to the Dress: Atlanta this morning while I checked my email and took care of some things with my internet business concerns.

Wow. That show made me so glad we're doing things the way we are--I can totally see why a friend who recently got married told me that she just went to the bridal salon alone, without telling any of the females in her family she was going, and found the dress that she wanted. I couldn't handle having to arrange an expedition with like 5 other people so that no one in the close family or friend circuit got offended at being excluded, and then finding what I thought was my dress only to have a mother or grandmother shoot it down. Bad enough if they were just there for company or for advice, but even worse if the parents are actually paying for the wedding and therefore, perhaps, entitled to help with the planning of it.

To hell with that. We're paying for it ourselves, which is of course part of why it's so ghetto chic and down-scaled. Also my parents are just not that concerned about such things. I think they're also, well, not particularly taken with any romantic notions about our day. Like, when my brother got married, it was after a normal courtship time period of 2 or 2 1/2 years, and he's the older sibling, and so on. Enter me, after an 8-year relationship and living quite separated from my extended family--they're not even invited to the wedding separated--and in the meantime my brother's got two kids on the ground, so my parents just aren't feeling too concerned about my actual wedding. Which is a boon. I don't have to have anyone telling me what to do or even offering opposition to what he and I decide. Basically, we're doing exactly what we want--at least insofar as we can manage to arrange it with the options we have to choose from--and the people we invite can come, and enjoy, or not.

And the limited guest list also means that if every one of our close friends wants to make a long speech, no extraneous guests will be rolling their eyes and complaining later about how long the toasts were, because everyone who will be there are those who care the most for us and would be pleased at such toasts. Or simply too inebriated to care, and that works just as well. Also, given that our entire wedding budget is less than what most of these women are allowing for their dress alone, we won't be putting ourselves into debt (either literally or just in the figurative sense of owing parents emotional favors for paying for a huge gala) to get married. Considering that we thought really hard about just going back to Venice and speaking vows in an echoing empty church with no one to witness it but the stones, we're pretty happy with this as a compromise.

So basically what I'm saying is, all the wedding shows on TLC just reinforce to me how non-traditionally I think about such things at this point in my life!