1st of August 2006
2 Month Countdown - yowsers!
Only 2 months to the wedding now. 2 months! Yikes! We'd better get the rats measured up for bridesmaids outfits.
Okay that was possibly a little too weird.
Anyway the reason for this blog was more to talk about a point Liz made on her blog recently:
First of all most of the focus of preparing for marriage, at least for the bride is supposed to be getting manicures, pedicures, having the best "skincare routine" (October?! you should have started exfoliating in at least January, darling!) and all that bollocks. No mention of such things as "discuss with your fiancee about how both of you see your marriage working" or any of that. In fact, barely any mention of the actuall marriage at all. No. To ensure my eternal future happiness with the one I love, it is vitally important that I WEAR THE RIGHT LIPSTICK AT THE WEDDING. Apparently. If I have the wrong hair or have a single spot, the groom and several guests are going to run screaming.
Secondly, apparently, it is supposed to be "my day". Matt is nothing more than a glorified extra.
Don't get me started on "centrepieces".
She makes a good point. It's strange, at least in my eyes, how men aren't supposed to be interested in any of the proceedings but women are. I've only seen one wedding magazine aimed at blokes and it had a very laid back attitude to the whole thing, where as by contrast all the others were clearly aimed at women (their style gave them away very quickly) and the only parts that are for blokes are written as "pull out pages" or "cut-out sections" which the over-busy wife-to-be can rip out and pin to his underpants while she's ironing, like we have to be tricked into giving a shit about our weddings.
But hey let's be fair. We no doubt went to all the effort of "wooing" our fiancées in the early days of our relationships. Undoubtedly we will have paid for all the romantic meals. We'd have been the ones who proposed, and who bought that £2,000 ring she now sports. And, most importantly of all, we will be the ones who will be out earning the money so she can go to the shops and buy herself shoes. So it's all perfectly fair really.
Ultimately I shall be a guest at my own wedding. It's kind of a sad fact that, because society sees weddings as being about the excited bride desperately running around to make sure the petunias look absolutely perfect while her cocky, possessive groom couldn't give a fuck about how - or indeed - who anyone is, or how the preperations were made because that's not macho enough, it leads to a lot of people thinking that's how it's SUPPOSED to be.
I've seen it at every wedding I've been to. Aunties marvelling over the bride's dress; the proud father having his picture taken with his daughter; the mother of the bride clucking around sorting out the last minute preperations and ensuring that everyone eats their fill of the buffet. The most attention the groom gets is when the father of the bride does the usual oh-so-comical "you'd better look after my daughter or you'll have me to answer to" routine. Like nobody's heard that one before. I suppose I get to make a speech though, so that's cool. I'll get tanked up on the free beer and call everyone a bunch of freeloading bastards. That'll give 'em a wedding to remember.
Or perhaps not.
I'm certainly glad we did the "pre-marriage counselling" thing with the church. It was a bit American, but it did raise some good discussion points that could, potentially, have led to conflict later on. The average couple spends approximately £17,000 on their first wedding (as most people have more than one these days). I don't have the figures for the average spending per couple on ensuring their marriage will remain strong, but I'm 99.9% certain it would be a shocking statistic if I had it.
Talking of the costs, even the "wedding on a shoe-string" articles expect you to be spending around £9,000 minimum. Ours will be clocking in at just over £4,000 (quick estimate) and that's including the honeymoons (we're having two). We could have probably done it even cheaper if we'd wanted, but it's nice to splash out a bit, and we are snowboarding for the second honeymoon which isn't a cheap pass-time.
I have come to really hate the whole commericalism of weddings. Ironically the way prices get hiked up as soon as you use the magic "w" word just cheapens the whole thing. When all the importance of a wedding is in the one-time goods you buy or hire for the day, is it any wonder that divorce rates are so high?