is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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ONBB (old new borrowed blue).
There�s something somewhat surreal about being on leave writing a book about how horrific violence affects individuals, communities and nations while also dealing with vendors who are 100% certain that if you don�t rent chair covers for your wedding reception you will be very unhappy with your party.
I am not one of those people who at a young age formed a really specific set of ideas about what my wedding would look like. I really never thought about it at all. I remember staging fake weddings with my sister and friends as a kid, but it was never my wedding. Later, in my twenties, I thought I would never get married for kneejerk feminist reasons (there are good feminist reasons but mine were not those), and I judged other people who got married in the way immature thinkers tend to judge others for not making the same decisions they do. Later on I came to see that, though there is indeed something strange and disturbing about state control over romantic unions, there also really is something wondrous and brave about deciding to commit to a person and gathering together friends and family as witnesses. It�s a way of saying that there is a future. Among other things.
There are of course other ways to commit to a future, and/or a person, and they aren�t less valid. I do not think a person needs to get married to have one or a series of meaningful commitments.
But I suppose even after I came to appreciate weddings or marriage I never thought it would happen to me. Why? Not because of my philosophical commitments, but because for roughly 7 years of my adult life no one even wanted to date me! I had a few dates here and there, some flirtations with potential, and even some relationship-like things that lasted a few months, but nothing serious. I wrote a lot about the loneliness of that, the freedom of it, and the various other ups and downs of it in my blog over the years. My formation of myself as an adult was in some way so solitary that it still sometimes blows my mind that I shouldn�t just leave the house, be led from errand to errand to meal to movie, without letting another person know where I am. Some people, especially those with kids, will read that sentence and feel jealousy, because I had so many years of what they do not have right now. What I�ve just described really is a freedom. But it has its downsides. Until I met Gus I really was one of those people who, if I, for instance, got electrocuted by my toaster, might not be found by authorities for a long period of time. I was alone.
Part of that was geographical. I have a really important and loving group of friends who have been my self-made-family for most of my adult life. Without them I would not be who I am and to this day they form an irreplaceable part of my life in good times and bad. I LOVE THEM TO DEATH. But none of them live where I live�a hazard of the academic job.
True story: a few months before I met Gus I had a breakthrough moment when I said to myself, �Maybe my only really meaningful adult relationships are going to be with this group of friends and family whom I love more than anything. And maybe that will be OK.� It was tremendously freeing. And I want to say categorically that it is NOT �what needed to happen� before I could meet a romantic partner. My meeting Gus and us liking each other enough to do the work to make a longlasting relationship work is a combination of luck and labor, and has nothing to do with my acceptance of spinsterhood (a name I�m using comically, OK?).
So part of my loneliness was due to having to move around for academic jobs. Part of it was being a woman with a PhD: believe me, there are still lots of men, even very smart men (and even some women, and I know this because I�ve dated around the spectrum), who don�t want to date a woman whom they fear might be smarter than they are. There are stories I could tell about that, but they are boring and you can fill them in yourself.
A strange thing about getting married now (in my mid-to-late 40s) is that, now that I�ve lived through decades worth of other people�s lame judgments about my choices, it�s actually somewhat difficult to give up my status as aging childless unmarried woman. (The aging and childless part isn�t changing.) I�ve written plenty about that in the blog over the years, too. I�ve worn it as a badge against a culture that would render it invisible or unhappy or pathetic, when it isn�t (or shouldn�t be) any of those things. I had such a good life all those years! The loneliness was about having to move away from San Francisco. It was not (or at least not only) about being a single woman with a PhD.
And getting married, which is something that you can make into whatever you want it to be rather than being told what it is by others, has a dramatic gravitational pull against which, if you want to make it into your own thing, you really do have to assert yourself.
Back to some dumb shit. Turns out, never having had specific fantasies about getting married can be a bit of a handicap if you do end up planning a wedding. Let it be said first that I am enjoying some aspects of the process. I LOVE PARTIES! I love celebrating love and friendship and enduring commitment. I love that Gus and I are doing something that will actually bring all the people who really matter to us but who otherwise would never be in the same room into the same room. And I love Gus.
And then all of a sudden you�re in a room with two caterers and a design consultant and they are asking you about what you�ve imagined for your day and how you want things to look and what kinds of traditions you are interested in honoring. And you�ve got nothing. NOTHING!
Same when you get to the cake shop to taste cakes. They think you probably have a starry-eyed idea about exactly how the cake should look. And you�ve got NOTHING.
I won�t say exactly how much we�re spending, because you don�t tell other people how much you�re spending to give them a good party (well, I�m sure I�ll tell some of you, but you know what I mean), but I can tell you I went into this with a figure in mind and then read in a book that most people have no idea how much large parties cost and will spend roughly twice what they thought. And that is pretty much what�s happening, even with all my no-nonsense approaching of conversations about chair covers. I mean, about the chair covers: we�re not even having a sit down dinner. Cocktails, hors d�ouevres, cake and fun. So, I think other people�s asses will cover the chairs just fine�but not for long, because they�re going to want to be DANCING.
Some of this practical attitude came to me naturally. But when you have no idea what you�re doing it can be hard to be practical about it. And when people are traveling long ways to get to your party, you also want to make sure they are well taken care of. So I�m glad I took the advice of my friend Evany�s friend Maggie Mason and read Meg Keene�s aptly titled A Practical Wedding. Because it is such a lovely little book. It is, like anything that mentions weddings, a bit more wedding-oriented than I am. But it is also the perfect combination of help with planning and reminder of how much of the stuff that will get pushed on you doesn�t matter. It helps you form for yourself a more specific set of background principles about what you want and don�t want, and then you can talk to the vendors and make decisions about ceremonies.
It�s not even necessarily the vendors� fault. We have picked a caterer and a cake shop who just listened to us, offered suggestions, and didn�t push anything we said no to. Those do exist. And maybe some of the ones that do push stuff are doing it to up their profits. But I think it�s actually more complicated than that. They really are very worried that if they don�t provide the bizarre idea of a �perfect wedding� that has emerged in our culture in the last 40 years (and the book also gives a really interesting history of weddings in the U.S), that the clients will be unhappy (and maybe even will cry and scream). And, who knows, they may be right! People do get pretty crazy about this stuff. One of the caterers we didn�t choose told me she could not possibly use the dishes that the venue already owns because they don�t all match. She repeated that even after I told her I didn�t care about that. Ha.
So, no, I am not going to scream and cry if the dishes don�t match or the chairs aren�t beautiful. I know what makes a party work: people. Sure you need a good setting, some food and booze and music. And we�ll have that, and plenty of it. Gus and I even found such an amazing quirky little venue for the party. It�s awesome. And we are going to do the kind of decorating that makes a venue feel festive. But it�s the people who make the party. Not the chair covers and the linens and flowers.
Gus and I have already had a couple of interesting and/or fraught conversations with other people about choices we have made. People are invested in ideas about these things. The Keene book was also really helpful about that�alerting me to it, because, like I said, I just didn�t now anything. And that being-alerted has already helped me help a few other people understand our plans and/or help myself not be offended by other people�s disappointments. The tremendous tidal force of the conventions around weddings can make even the most unconventional people think that there are expectations that simply aren�t there. You can free yourself and (almost) everyone else from them! (And there�s still the part of me that has to stand back and say: Why am I learning this?!)
11:44 a.m. - February 03, 2013
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