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.
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
It seems in my rush to tell the story that I got a few facts wrong (like Mark Twain says, why let the facts get in the way of a good story), so I’ll let Groomasaurus Gal set me straight:
First, I was not looking for a Paul Oakenfold CD. It was Sasha & Digweed’s “Communications” which a high-school friend of mine (hello Wayne) had recommended. Second, the CD he recommended I buy (which I did) was John Kelly’s “Dessert Landscapes 1″ which I didn’t like very much. Thankfully I was able to overlook that. There’s more, but it would take all night so I’m limiting myself to the 2 crucial ones.
Thanks Groomasaurus Gal for those needed corrections … I’m sure there will be more to come in the upcoming months.
by Jeff on April 13, 2009
The perfect place to start a wedding blog is at the beginning … so here goes.
Groomasaurus Gal and I met in a record store. Yep, you read that right. A record store. You see, we’re both music aficionados. Well, that’s putting it lightly. We’re unapologetic and incurable music junkies. To date, between the two of us we own a few walls worth of CDs and untold vinyl and cassette albums (the big step in moving our relationship forward was combining our music collections, but that’s another blog entry).
With that preface out of the way, here’s the story. It was a balmy afternoon in late June and I was bored and decided to browse in one of my favorite record stores in Denver. The place is called Jerry’s Record Exchange, and it’s owned by a cranky, crusty, loveable guy named John who is the consummate record snob. I’ve actually witnessed him literally laugh in the face of someone who once asked if he had any Shania Twain (all apologies to her fans) and tell them to go to Tower (back when Tower was still around).
I was over in the dance/electronica section (I have a soft spot for house music) browsing for god know what when I noticed the alluring woman next to me browsing through some really mediocre Paul Oakenfold dance mixes. She eventually settled on one, at which point I told her that she didn’t want that one. She looked at me a bit circumspectly (like “Who is this freak?”), and I told her that there were much better discs by the prince of DJs.
Of course, when a stranger tells you your choice of music is a bit off, most of us would flash the “talk to the hand” sign and make for the door. Kudos to her for sticking around and debating the ebbs and flows of Paul Oakenfold’s career as well as other and varied topics (Groomasaurus Gal is an attorney, meaning she is very good at debating). So after chatting about music for a half-hour or so, we were both finished browsing and we ready to purchase our CDs. This is where I turned into a typical, clueless male idiot.
Instead of asking for her phone number or if she wanted to meet up for a drink sometime, for some unspeakable reason I started talking baseball with the owner of the store (I know he’s a lifelong Cubs fan, and I’m an Indians fan, so we have years of futility to draw from). Although I do enjoy a day at the ballpark, there’s only one thing more dreadfully boring than watching a baseball, and that’s two guys talking about baseball. I’m sure cancer could have been cured by now or the economy righted if guys would only focus on the task at hand and stop talking about sports, but I digress.
Needless to say, when I finally pull my head out of my a**, I discover that the wonderful woman with whom I was talking was gone. This was the point where I walked outside and ran my head into a parking meter about a dozen times because I’m so stupid. Anyways, I was heading out of town that weekend to hang out with a bunch of friends for 4th of July in Chicago, and I decided I’d call up the owner of the record store when I got back to ask for that woman’s phone number.
She beat me to it, god bless her. When I got back to town, I discovered a voicemail from Groomasaurus Gal asking me if I would like to join her for a drink or “beverage of some sort.” Seems that she called the owner of the record store before I could. This will remain the only time in my life I was actually stalked, and I’m so proud of it. Of course I couldn’t dial the phone fast enough, and we had our first date a few days later, oddly at a restaurant that neither of us likes that much. (Years later I discovered that women consider this place good for a first date because the bar is right next to the front door and within feet of a transit shuttle in case they need to make a quick getaway. Good thinking.)
But the kicker was our second date. Paul Oakenfold was actually performing at Red Rocks, and it had been sold out for weeks, so I figured I’d go up with her and her friend and get a scalped ticket. Problem was that nobody was selling. I told her to go in, as it was no use for her and her friend to miss the show, and I’d hang out in the parking lot and stare at the stars or something equally ridiculous. Unfazed, she hatched up a plan in which she sweet-talked a security guard into letting me in and slipped me her friend’s ticket stub, saying it had fallen off in the parking lot. The guy actually bought it!! If I had tried this, he and his bouncer henchmen would have stuffed me in a trash barrel and spent the rest of the night pinging beer cans off my head. At this moment, I realized three things about this woman: 1) She is way smarter than me. 2) She will stop at nothing to make other people happy. 3) She is what I’ve always been looking for. The rest is history (which we will save for another day).
