Ranting On...Weddings

Okay, you knew this was coming.  While we have celebrated love and marriage and weddings all week, I couldn’t help but add our Friday rant into the mix, and so I will be making a bit of a rant (and I apologize in advance to any of my friends who have done anything listed below at their weddings or will do it at a future ceremony-I promise I still had/will have fun!).

The big thing, though, that I want to point out as I list this rant is that as a whole, I don’t have as many pet peeves about weddings, but this is because my biggest gripe falls under a Catch-22 umbrella.  You see, my biggest pet peeve regarding weddings is not anything the bride-or-groom do, but instead the people who insert themselves into the wedding.

I remember Carrie Bradshaw complaining in an episode of Sex and the City (the source of all romantic knowledge) about how a wedding is the one day that is truly about celebrating you.  We all get birthdays (and as you get older, most everyone forgets when your birthday is anyway), and we all get funerals (but you don’t really get to know what happens at your own, unless you're Tom Sawyer), but weddings are truly the only day that all of your friends, family, and loved ones get together to celebrate you and the person you are committing yourself to for the rest of your life.  The day, therefore, should be something that is all about you and your personality (and your spouse’s admittedly).

But through the years, I have seen my friends do things at their wedding that they didn’t want to do.  They’ve invited people they didn’t want to come, increased or decreased the size of their wedding guest list based on insistence or sense-of-duty, and made the day something that they hadn’t envisioned, and I think that’s wrong.  While expense is always a factor (not all of us can get 2,000 guests on a yacht), if someone wants to have a small, intimate ceremony, that’s up to them.  If someone doesn’t want to make a big deal of their wedding, that’s up to them.  If someone wants a dozen bridesmaids and to wear an exact replica of the Princess Di dress and have their wedding reception at the Olive Garden, that’s between them and their MasterCard.  My big pet peeve is when others (let’s be honest here, primarily parents and siblings) try to force their beliefs onto the ceremony in a way that takes away from their vision.

This also relates to one of my other pet peeves-people who get mad when, during their engagement, someone else gets engaged that they are related to or best friends with.  Don’t propose within a one-month radius of the wedding ceremony if you are close enough to know the people involved well (and never propose at a wedding ceremony, as that is beyond tacky), but otherwise this is fair game.  Anyone who gets mad because their sister got engaged two months after them is just being petty and really showing massive, massive bridezilla points (unless it’s the parents who are paying for both weddings-they can gripe if they’d like).

I don’t have too many more peeves to air here, mainly because that point above applies to me too-it’s your wedding, not mine (presumably, unless my future husband is reading this post, in which case-hey, how’s it going, thanks for marrying me!).  I will offer a couple of suggestions, though, but feel free to ignore them:

-Please register for gifts.  If I’m invited to your wedding, you know I want to buy you something, and no, I’m not gift enough (I’ve met me, and if you’re going to buy me dinner and have me be part of your special day, you should get a blender along with my smiling visage).

-Please do a seating arrangement if there’s a dinner.  If it’s just a wedding ceremony or a hyper-casual, no dinner reception, you can skip this, but otherwise, as a single person who came to your wedding by themselves, a seating arrangement makes the dinner so much less awkward.  Having to either sit at the bar or hunt for someone else who is by themselves is such a bummer, especially after seeing someone proclaim their love to each other.

-In this vein, don’t be super offended if your single friends don’t stick around for the full dance.  This may seem rude (okay, it probably is rude), but again, as a single person, I know what they’re going through.  Wedding dances are a minefield of slow songs mixed in with Kelly Clarkson and Sir Mix-a-Lot, and it’s the worst to have to run to the “bathroom” every third song when you don’t have a date, or to be forced to slow dance with people platonically.  I promise, I heart you to pieces if I came, so don't feel I'm cutting out because I'm not having a good time.

And those are my rants on weddings (relatively tame, I’d admit).  And if you happen to be getting married soon, what are your rants about guests/people (crazy wedding guest stories are always fun).  Share in the comments!