When my fiancée Perri and I hopped on an introductory call with a wedding photographer a couple of months ago, I wasn’t ready for his statement when he heard my voice.
“Most grooms aren’t on the first call,” he said, a combination of surprised and matter of fact.
“Well,” I replied, “if you work with us, you’ll learn I’m not like most grooms.”
I’ll admit there was a bit of defensiveness in my response. Perri and I had only been wedding planning for a bit, but I’d already seen almost everything addressed in her name, my email left off calendar invites even when I’d been copied on the threads from the beginning, and one other vendor was surprised it was me checking out a venue and not my fiancée.
I get it. The stereotype in wedding planning is that the bride does all the work and the groom shrugs at the design of the invitations and floral color scheme. I’ve heard man after man say, “I don’t really care about those things.” And, the truth is, some of those things I don’t care about that much either. My fiancée is a graphic designer and fashion lover. Her eye for color is something that will always outpace mine. I want her leading the conversations about invitations and flowers—but I want to still be involved in them too.
It’s a question of engagement. Perri and I are on this journey together. I want us to walk alongside each other, allowing one or the other to lead when the time is right. Perri cares about invitations and color schemes, I care about the ceremony and working with our rabbi for several months leading up to the wedding.
What matters to each of us is different, but that doesn’t mean the other doesn’t participate. Too many men allow the “happy wife, happy life” paradigm to rule their participation in all aspects of their relationship. They’ve been sold a bill of goods that says that making someone else happy is what will make them happy. That’s, as many people have found out, a recipe for resentment not happiness. Instead, full, active participation across the board—and always speaking up for what’s important to you—can lead to the happiness almost all of us are seeking.
Unfortunately, I’m noticing a wedding industry that doesn’t always encourage that level of full participation from the groom. It’s subtle and quietly corrosive. In fact, it’s built on decades of brides driving the wedding planning process. It’s adapted to our reality, and I’m sure, meant to be efficient and give those tired grooms a break from questions they don’t feel like answering. But it may also be part of why many men feel purposeless, and many women feel disconnected from their men.
Men are told, time and again, what they should and shouldn’t care about. In everything from weddings to childrearing, and business to sports.
One of the first lessons I learned about relationships from my The Men’s Group: A Novel of Messy Friendships co-author Nick Papadopoulos was to stop saying, “I don’t care” when a woman asked anything from what I wanted for dinner to what I thought about her outfit.
He told me a story about one day waking up in the apartment he lived in with his ex-wife and realizing that she’d chosen all the furniture. He looked around and didn’t feel at home at all. Their marriage didn’t last for much longer.
“When you say, ‘I don’t care,’” Nick told me when I was 24, “what women often hear is, ‘I don’t care about you.’”
That’s always stuck with me. And as Perri and I go through the process leading up to our wedding, it’s something I carry with me. Not only do I care—about our relationship, our wedding, and our marriage—but I want Perri to know I care.
Getting married is a momentous transition into a new phase of life. That transition begins the moment a proposal is accepted. While our culture often elevates the wedding as a celebratory affair of what’s to come next, it’s actually the months leading up to the wedding that make celebration worthy. The transition to marriage doesn’t happen at the altar or under the chuppah, it begins during the wedding-planning process—an integral part of the transition into marriage itself.
I want to be careful not to make men feel like they should care about their weddings. I care about mine, but that doesn’t mean you need to care about yours. Instead, what I urge is for each of us—man or woman—to care about what we care about, regardless of what society says we should.
I’m still more than a year away from my wedding, and there are days I find Perri doing far more than I am—in fact, there are first calls I’ve not been on. In those moments, I wonder how engaged I really am in this process. Am I doing what other grooms have done for many years? Am I not engaging fully, even when I claim how important it is?
The truth is complicated. Perri and I are on our way to marriage. There will be times when she carries more and when I carry more. Right now, we’re in it and going through this grand transition in the way we choose to. Which is the only thing any of us can do. The only roadmap is the one you choose—the one that is right for you.
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