Wedding Planning: A Groom’s Perspective
Saturday, February 6th, 2010 at 1:51pm
As far as I’m concerned, there are four levels of involvement:
- Interested
- Unqualified
- Utterly Confused
- Bringer of Monetary Sanity
Interested: Proposal. Outcome: Success. But, good lord… Can you imagine how this guy felt??
In most cases, I end up either interested or utterly confused. Of course, there are times when I’m simply unqualified for the task at hand. For example, I couldn’t have possibly been qualified to help determine what wedding dress Miss Gator chose because I’ve made a commitment to wait to see her in it on our wedding day. Being completely uninterested, for me, is rare enough to ignore for this list.
I’m going to try and briefly detail each level of involvement to help you get a better understanding of what you (for any future grooms reading this) or your spouse-to-be should expect to feel during the course of planning your wedding…
Interested
Honestly, I like this one the most. As you can tell, I’m a proactive groom… I mean, heck… I’m blogging on my bride’s wedding blog. From what I’ve heard, most brides can’t even get the groom to help pick out a cake (cake testing is FREE… come on…). But, I digress. Miss Gator and I are both designers by trade and hobby—we like getting involved in making cool things that others can enjoy. Simple as that.
So, here’s a list of the things I’ve been most interested in during this looonnggg wedding planning escapade:
The beaches of Maui. Oh and look! Orange & Blue… how appropriate! Source: Hawaiian
Beaches
- The technical stuff (our wedding website, this blog, you name it…)
- Planning the Honeymoon (how could you not be interested in going to Maui?)
- Music for the Ceremony (love me some strings)
- Videography (Miss Gator will be doing an article on this once we get it all finalized)
Of course there have been a few times where I’ve been highly interested and then had to be the bringer of monetary sanity. One shining example is the wedding ceremony chairs. Miss Gator wanted these white wooden chairs for the ceremony—you’ve all seen them, they’re very nice—but, you see, the problem was that we are planning a wedding with 150 guests and an approximately 15-20 minute ceremony.
From what I recall, the rental of these chairs was somewhere in the realm of $350! Can you believe that? I mean, don’t get me wrong, the chairs were nice but there’s just no way to justify that kind of expense for such a short amount of time… It’s not Miss Gator’s fault though; she was blinded by a most- innocent lust for a beautiful wedding—the wedding she deserves.
Unqualified
Being UCF alumnus, the occasion in which I would find myself unqualified for a particular task is highly unlikely. Program advanced digital interfaces? Sure. Build a robot? Piece of cake. Calculate the world’s new highest prime number in my head? Verging on impossible, but, sure, why not? Choose the flowers for our wedding… I think not.
Miss Gator’s inspiration board
Men (most of us anyway) are just not wired to think about, let alone understand, all the minute details of life. This is why we have women in our lives—to make sure we don’t forget birthdays and to remind us to send thank you cards to the people who care about us… Frankly, I think this ineptitude probably stems from my (and probably many men’s) general lack of attention to the trivialities of life. I’ve found that I’m more adapted to thinking about the grand or, rather, long-term goal. The downfall with that way of thinking is that I sometimes might miss out on key opportunities to actually achieve that long-term goal—and that’s where Miss Gator comes in. We make such a great team because she frets (healthily) about the minutiae of everyday life while I focus on our longterm stability (of course, we both dabble in each other’s forte from time to time) . In any case, I was not qualified for concocting the grand plan for this wedding, so I guess my argument is moot (Miss Gator hates that word) anyways.
Some things I found I was unqualified for:
- Anything Floral
- Shoes, veil, and basically anything related to Miss Gator’s attire for all occasions (I think she’s beautiful no matter what, so it’s hard)
- All the little bits of stationary (save the dates, RSVP cards, invitations, thank you cards, maps, menus, you name it…). What is involved with this is mind-blowing.
Utterly Confused
Being utterly confused is really more a part of being a guy than it is about being a groom. Women are, all too often, confounding, confusing, and complicated. One particular instance comes to mind, actually, and it has to do with photography. A second round of engagement photos, in fact. My first thought was that our photo shoot with Starks Photography was already amazing, why do we need more? Also, the idea seemed presumptuous—who the heck is going to want to see all these new photos?? Of course, some of you know already that we actually won the second shoot with Lindsey of Pure Photography.
Super cute photo from Miss Gator and I’s second engagement shoot.
Even though we had won the session, I was still skeptical of what the heck we were going to do with the photos. I just didn’t understand… you might say I was utterly confused. Needless to say, Miss Gator is very convincing and, so, we went through with it… and now I see why. The pictures were awesome, they were free, and the whole experience was just fun. Sometimes you just have go have some fun.
I would compile a list of the things I don’t understand, but without understanding them it’s hard to list and describe them. If I think of some, I’ll update the article.
Bringer of Monetary Sanity
Yes, sometimes Miss Gator gets a liiittle bit outta control. The poor girl, she just wants the perfect wedding—the wedding of her dreams—the one she’s been dreaming about since she was a little girl. Then the big mean Mr. Knight has to come and yank it out from under her. Naturally, it’s got to be more like when someone rips the table cloth off a table that’s covered in fine china without disturbing a single piece of it—I don’t want to crush her dreams, I just sometimes need to remove the fancy table cloth. Know what I mean? I wish I could give her everything she deserved… and, maybe one day I will be able to.
A few examples of nixed ideas:
- Crazy-expensive wedding shoes: $298
- Millions of bridesmaids gifts
- Reception at a number of really expensive venues (we would’ve had to reduce our guest list by 1/3).
- Honeymoon to Europe (we kinda both came to this conclusion)
Overall, the wedding planning experience (so far) has been a testament to how blessed Miss Gator and I’s relationship is. When we work together, anything is possible even if it means that I have to crush dreams of a fantastically-perfect wedding to settle for the practically-perfect wedding. Or that she has to drag me to a photo shoot at Blue Springs to prove that it’s worth it. I love her and I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life working towards our goals together.
Tags: Ceremony, groom, Reception, wedding
marina Says:
