Wedding Wednesday
A moderately helpful tome for grooms and other patient, intelligent males.
Posted by: Laura Cassidy on May 25, 2011 at 07:15AM
It’s good to be wary of anything that claims to be a “complete guide to the perfect” anything, but there is some guidance worth noting in this new book.
If there’s one assumption that Seattle Met Bride & Groom makes, it’s that these days, both the bride and the groom (or the bride and the bride and the groom and the groom) are equals in this thing called a wedding, just as they are equals in marriage.
Each issue I see proof of it—the guys who submit their photos for Real Weddings and then serve as the main point-of-contact and answer the survey question all on their own. Yes, guys. It happens every issue more than once. And I hear from wedding vendors all the time about grooms who take the lead in planning and vendor selection if not decor.
So when their new book came across my desk, I wondered what John Bridges and Bryan Curtis had to say to modern men about their modern roles. The introduction didn’t charm me.
"As the happy day grows nearer, any mention of ‘Jason and Mary Sue’s wedding will have been absorbed into ‘Mary Sue’s wedding,’ goes the preparatory text.
Uh-oh. So, Bridges and Curtis are not assuming that the two of you of are entering into this thing as dynamic duo. They’re assuming that Mary Sue is a crazed warrior bride who will take down anyone who stands between her and a 25 just-so peony centerpieces in coral—not blush, not rose, not hot pink.
That annoyed me. The passage, “More than once, the groom will have every good reason to feel like the forgotten man of the hour—a cog in the great wheel of marital merrymaking, just a necessary means to an end, a guy whose only function is to show up and say, ‘Well, yes, I think I do,’” annoyed me even more. Can’t we assume that a gentleman is marrying a gentlelady not bridezilla? Can’t we assume that he cares about throwing a grand event and that she cares that he cares?
But as I read on, I found some really useful information on thank you notes, dance class, tying a bow tie, and the all important who-pays-for-what stuff. Aside from the whole cog-in-a-wheel-who’s-marrying-a-nightmare, the authors are generous to their reader; they figure he’s a smart guy, a patient soul, a caring friend and partner. They seem to want to help him—mostly through a series of affirmation-like statements that bookend each subject or topic (“A gentleman prints out his self-composed vows on stiff card stock and grips them tightly. He does not trust fragile copy paper, which will shake because his hands will be shaking too.”). And here “him” also refers to fathers, best men, groomsmen, and even guests. After all, each of these gentlemen will be walking down the aisle—just not in the grand way that the gentlemen in the tailcoat (see page 179) will be.
It’s an okay little tome as it turns out. The authors are not new to the milieu of the gentleman. They have between them a number of volumes on masculine etiquette, including a special edition for Brooks Brothers called A Gentleman Entertains. (Probably not a bad next-in-series for the home collector who finds Walks Down the Aisle of use, considering how much a wedding can and should be like the biggest and best party of one’s life.
So I suggest that, if you’re looking for written words to aid you in navigating the planning and execution of your big day, you go ahead and pick up this book from your local independent book seller, and then, before leaving the store, rip out the two pages that make up the introduction. I wish that it were more practical to also have you go through and blacken certain passages where the tone gets condescending and the equilibrium is off. Why, for example, does the hypothetical bride in the section that deals with the possibility of an elopement, have to have such a whining tone? Why does she have to call her father “Daddy?” What is that?
But here’s the thing: A gentleman will have to filter out a lot of imperfect information between now and the big day. (So will a lady.) And while modern dudes, in my experience, are more than happy to take on caterers and DJs and plot intricate and highly political reception table seating charts, that isn’t stuff men were born knowing how to do. Women weren’t born knowing how to do it, either, but the planet generally supposes that she’s been daydreaming of this stuff since kindergarten and thus has some weirdly innate ability to rattle off canapes and color palettes. In addition to our big, fat gorgeous magazines (now on the iPad!) and these Wedding Wednesday posts, you may well both need a book or two to see you through. A gentlemen could do worse than this one.
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