Wedding industry

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Wedding Planning 101: Lessons from Kim and Kanye

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I don’t usually follow celebrity gossip, but whenever I visit my hairstylist or the doctor’s office, I enjoy flipping through a cheesy magazine or two. After all, it would be un-American of me not to maintain at least a basic knowledge of the intimate details of vast numbers of people I’ll never meet and rarely respect. While getting my hair done not long ago, I was perusing my stylist’s back-stash of celebrity rags and saw a magazine headline from fall 2013, something along the lines of “Kim leaves wedding planning to Kanye.” Along with most of the rest of the internet, I’ve seen a bit more of Kim Kardashian lately than I ever really needed or wanted to, though truth be told, I only know who she or any of the Kardashians is because their antics get so much press coverage (if coverage is the right word…). Sans cable or satellite, I don’t get E! and have never seen the family’s reality show. In fact, I’m proud to report I had to look up which network even carries it; as further proof of our compatibility, Steve didn’t know either!

The part of the headline that caught my eye was not “Kim” nor “Kanye” (the musician who railed at Taylor Swift for winning a Grammy he thought someone else deserved, yes?). The words I latched onto were, no surprise, “wedding planning.” Steve and I are, relatively speaking, still in the early stages of corralling the vast compendium of activities that innocent-sounding phrase describes, but I continue to feel amazed and overwhelmed at the seemingly infinite reach of this thing called the “wedding industry.”

So, when I read the headline, I had three thoughts, in this order: (1) Wow, there are times when I wish I could hand it all off to Steve. (2) I could never hand it all off to Steve—I’ve waited years to plan my wedding! And finally, (3): Bullshit. Kanye’s idea of wedding planning probably means making a list of extravagant ideas, picking up a phone to hire a wedding planner, and then telling his staff to get busy. Methinks–as I have texted back and forth with my mom about fabric choices, spent hours perusing photographers’ websites, and sent yet another email to our chosen venue, asking, again, when can we, please, sign a contract?—Mr. West’s dreaming up ever more grandiose ideas with nary a worry of how to finance any of them does not count as “planning.”

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Color Me _______

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A week after my bookstore visit, I had chosen my wedding colors.

In my defense, my headlong plunge into planning wasn’t entirely a result of my inability to resist the wedding industry’s wooing—though it’s a persistent suitor. When you’re a bride-to-be, the special offers start coming your way, and fast: coupons and websites and bride bags, sweepstakes open only to the betrothed. The steady stream of messages proclaiming your special status is seductive, but the truth is that the most special thing about you in the eyes of the industry is that you and your family are preparing to drop some dough. All those folks fawning over your bride-ness are hoping that (a) it’s a lot of dough, and (b) you’ll send it their way.

It’s sometimes irritated me, actually, that we féte brides and grooms with such fervor, while we all but ignore many milestone accomplishments that result from flat-out hard work. The happy couple, after all, has already won the lottery of luck and timing, so why do they get the cake too—not to mention the complimentary tasting? Follow the money, though, and there’s no market for grandly celebrating something like, say, earning an advanced degree. Most grad students live on the edge of poverty, and mass graduation ceremonies—usually long and boring and involving uncomfortable chairs—are a much harder sell than a garden party with free booze and a DJ.

But I digress. 🙂

I was excited about our engagement, of course, and in love, and all those long-tamped down and tossed aside dreams from my girlhood rapidly re-surfaced. That’s the state in which the wedding industry can have you at hello, the danger zone wherein they can talk you into moneymakers masquerading as must-have traditions, whip you into a frenzy of wants disguised as needs. Caution is well advised.

For me, though, the industry, with all its wiles, wasn’t the greatest source of temptation.  Continue reading →

The “Anti-Bride” and Me

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Within two days of arriving home after our Virginia Beach engagement, I found myself standing in Barnes and Noble, staring at shelf upon shelf of books for brides-to-be.

There were planners and checklists, do-it-yourself decorating tips, weddings-on-a-budget books; thick binders and skinny hardbacks and sleek spiral-bound volumes of all shapes and sizes (weirdly, a bit uniformly pink in bookshelf1hue–really, are we twelve?). All claimed they’d help me plan the wedding of my dreams. And I hadn’t even gotten to the magazine section, where a row of strangely serious, sculpted women, all angled elbows and white lace, brooded out at me from the covers of at least ten different glossy tomes.

I was mesmerized. And a little horrified. Continue reading →

Will YouTube Marry Me?

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Everyone’s first question, as soon as you sport a ring on your finger, is “How did he propose?”  The available answers seem to grow increasingly complex: a quick internet search reveals choreographed dance routines with professional performers, day-long scavenger hunts where the couple’s friends pop up with clues, private rooftop dinners accompanied by string quartets or even salsa bands. Websites abound offering guidance on creating the “perfect proposal,” and there are event planners whose sole focus is designing not weddings but “proposal packages.” The “Plan Your Proposal” button on one such site leads to a menu that not only strongly encourages hiring a pro to document the event but also includes a “Book a Flash Mob” link and an “Ask the Expert” option, where you can “run your proposal ideas” past a “proposal expert” and get a response in three days.

Um, how exactly does one qualify to become a “proposal expert”?

Bold public proposals or creative, extravagant approaches are genuinely romantic when they fit the couple. My brother proposed to my sister-in-law in front of a crowd packed with friends and members of an organization that had changed his life; they were the very people who’d encouraged him to live large and dare initiate the relationship in the first place. ❤ And if you’re a professional actor wooing a producer, it makes sense to stage an actual live lip-dub street production to pop the question! But so many “big” proposals seem less an outgrowth of a couple’s personal history than a product of growing social and market pressures to manufacture a “perfect” but artificial moment. After all, most of us aren’t professional performers, and how dreamy is it, really, to purchase someone else’s pre-packaged idea of a romantic gesture, or, for that matter, to tell not only your friends but also a roomful of random flash-mob dancers that you want to marry Susie before you tell Susie herself?

Somewhere along the way, proposing marriage has become a kind of competitive spectator sport. The big proposal now rivals the big wedding. Full of flash and splash, scripted and staged, it’s a public performance of your commitment, recorded for posterity. Because, of course, someone is always there filming these über-events.  Otherwise, what’s the point?

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