That’s a loaded statement if there ever was one. I got started thinking about this topic today as I was talking to a client of mine (I run a branding/marketing business in my non-blogging life) who is in her mid-20s and has the next 3 weekends booked to attend 3 friends’ weddings. I thought back to my mid-20s and, in that fog of activity, I hazily remember weddings ticking off as regular as hours on the clock. I grew up in Ohio and then lived in DC for a fair amount of my 20s, so attended both friendly potluck receptions with amazingly decadent downhome cooking along as well as estate/country-clubby lobster-and-steak affairs thrown by some of my wealthier friends’ parents. Both types were fun and memorable in their own ways, but I digress.
How many candles will be on your wedding cake is sort of a silly question
We were talking about age and the question of what is the right time to get married. Of course the answer is different for everyone. Most of my guy friends who have daughters say that the appropriate age to wed is around 63, give or take a few decades. Most of my female friends have a very fluid stance on this, as many of them have stated to me that it was important to them to gain a sense of self-awareness before getting married. I think this is a great philosophy, as it’s an asset to the relationship if at least one individual has a dose of self-awareness. Again, I digress.
What I’m putting off here is talking about my own age. I’m 41, and I’ve never been married, which makes me at best a wild-card and at worst a freak who could never get his s**t together or who lives with his mother. I don’t consider myself either, as I’ve come close to being married once before and am not really a difficult person or frighteningly ugly, and, for the record, I stopped living with my dear parents when I graduated from college. I just hadn’t yet found the right person until I met Groomasaurus Gal. We’ve dated 9 years now and although we’ve been fully committed to each other the whole time, we haven’t felt the need to get married until the last year or two. Now just feels like the right time, so 41 is the right age for me.
As for everyone else, I think different ages feel different pressures. When I was 25, I was in a relationship that I thought was heading toward marriage, and had certain ideas in my head about being a husband and father and such. I also think if I had a biological clock beating me into a panic that definitely would have swayed my thinking, too. On the other end of the spectrum, I have friends in their late 50s who have lived together for 24 years and never gotten married but love each other dearly and are just as committed to each other if they had.
So the answer to that question is that there isn’t an answer … just find the person for you, follow your heart and pursue what makes you both happy.
When I listen to music, when I read a book, I often catch myself thinking of how the act of listening or reading unfolds in time. In that unfolding is the expectation of what is to come, the elation of the moment and the bittersweet taste of a memory already starting to fade.
So it is with everything that happens in time, including a wedding. It’s often common to hear brides and grooms talk about not being able to wait until their wedding day arrives - focused on one day, a buildup to a signpost moment in their lives. But in only keeping our eyes on a future moment, we often miss what’s happening in the many moments in between.
I myself am just as guilty of looking past the present to get to the future faster, wishing I had some sort of speed warp to thrust me towards my goals and dreams faster. But it’s the getting there that makes that anticipated moment so special, and so I’ve been trying to slow myself down when I think of planning our wedding. When I enter my cousins’ names in our guest list, I try to retrieve memories of them opening presents at Christmas or throwing a football on Thanksgiving. As I think about the words to use in our ceremony, I reminisce about what in my first encounters with my bride-to-be made me intrigued and curious, and what later moved me to understand she was the person I couldn’t be without.
The old saw of slow and steady wins the race only applies if you’re in a race. An engagement isn’t a race; rather, it’s the music of anticipation.
I’ve mentioned a few times that we are having a destination wedding in Mexico, and I wanted to share with you all where it’s all going to happen.
After more than two months of frustration in trying to get hotels and wedding facilities in Puerto Vallarta (our favorite Mexican resort town) to even return our emails and phone calls, we finally found one that not only returns phone calls but has made planning and organizing our wedding so much easier.
They are called Adventure Weddings and they are based in Puerto Vallarta. They offer a few different types of wedding packages, but we decided to go with the full boat (which was amazingly affordable – under $10K) and have the beach wedding at a secluded location called Las Caletas. It’s only accessible by sea and is the former home of the film director John Huston (who directed Night of the Iguana right in Puerto Vallarta … a classic movie with Richard Burton and Ava Gardner). Here’s some pics of the beach location. We can’t wait … uh, well, actually we can wait, cause we don’t really want to head south of the border right now with Mexico being hit so hard by the swine flu and everything. Anyways, here’s the pics…
The setup for the ceremony
The view from the sea
This is the first in a series of posts on wedding elements in which your groom-to-be actually has an interest. With this being the first article, let’s start with one of the most obvious elements – the types of alcohol served at your wedding.
Yum ... grooms likey the tequila
There is that slice of the male population that tee-totals, but for the most part we guys like to imbibe a potent potable on occasion (or on the hour, every hour, as some of my former frat brothers were in the habit of doing). For many guys, drinking was a right of passage that some of us never quite got past. I remember as a kid trying to sneak sips from my dad’s beer can at parties, and I once recall my brother and I as teens invading our parents liquor cabinet and taking hits off those bottles we knew they hadn’t touched in years. Unfortunately that meant swigging at a bottle of Midori with a Drambuie chaser (a god-awful combination), which later on led to a chaser of Pepto Bismol.
And then there was college, where it was tacitly understood that drinking until you were half-blind was a sign of maturity – as asinine as that may sound. As we move beyond those more reckless and misguided years, drinking evolves into both a more social activity – enjoying cocktails with friends, hitting happy hour with co-workers, etc. – as well as a solitary respite (i.e., when we return home and knock one back to take the edge off another day of tolerating our dunderheaded boss).
Regardless of what came before this juncture, to whatever extent your guy drinks, he will still be interested in what will be served at his wedding. For the bride who is having a tough time prodding her fella into participating in the planning process – not a shocker to any extent – this affinity for drink may actually be your opportunity to delegate. If he can write and talk and add, he can certainly talk with your caterer or facility and coordinate with them the kinds of beverages you want as well as the budget you have set aside. Hopefully your beau has honed his negotiating chops over the years by haggling with car dealers (might as well throw another cliche in the mix), so he should be able to talk down your vendors to a decent price for all the booze.
Speaking for myself, it’s always nice to have another set of eyes looking over my work, as I’ve been known to become so enamored with a certain drink that it’s not beyond reason that I’d order 20 fifths of Don Julio and 10 cases of tempranillo and nothing else. So once the groom has assembled his list, give it a once over to make sure he’s included the champagne as well as that favorite rum of yours.
Bottoms up, and happy planning…
