At my bachelor party, I had a great time, but I did have a nagging feeling throughout. I brought a very eclectic group of guys of different ages, backgrounds, and races that I’ve grown close to at various stages of life. This included some of my best friends in high school, some of my best friends in college, and the best friends I’ve made as a teacher in Baltimore.
Again, I enjoyed myself and had a lot of fun, but my biggest worry was whether this group of people that I cast a wide net on could get along and enjoy each others’ presence.
It turns out my worries were unfounded because everyone did get along, or at least they all told me they got along and had a great time.
That was two weeks ago, but in two days, I have my wedding coming up.
If I was worried about a group of very different people coming together and having a good time at my bachelor party, I’m going to be pretty worried about the 200 people coming to my wedding from very different backgrounds and experiences all getting along, too. It probably wasn’t my preference at the beginning to have this many people, but my fiancee has a huge family and we’re representing a variety of cultural backgrounds between her Nigerian side of the family and my Chinese side.
A lot of people have asked me and my fiancee about how we’re feeling and whether we’re excited. I am excited, but I’m also very nervous. I’m nervous about whether everyone is going to get along, obviously, but I’m also very nervous about the things that are more within my control. That includes not doing well on the dance floor, stuttering and not remembering to say the right things for my vows, wardrobe malfunctions, and, well, your imagination can go wild with all the things that can go wrong during your wedding.
Last week, we spent hours figuring out how to seat people at the wedding. One thing we didn’t like about other weddings we have attended is that people who knew the groom and people who knew the bride were often separated and not mixed in seating charts. So we decided to mix my side of the wedding and her side as much as possible.
We had to anticipate who was more social, who was more introverted, who would get along with who, and how to seat our very mixed and diverse group that included people of all races, religions, political beliefs, and age. I got a small kick out of mixing some of my friends in their mid-20s with adults who might be in their 60s, but I picked them because they can make conversation and get along with anyone.
Weddings are supposed to be “your day” that’s meant to be a lot of fun. But it is always a balancing act too. One of those balancing acts is money. I cannot believe how expensive some parts of this wedding are, or the fact that simply paying someone to bake a bunch of brownies, cupcakes, and cookies costs over two grand. My soon-to-be wife has been more involved in the planning process, and I’ve been more involved in paying for stuff, as well as both of our fathers. It has not been cheap in the slightest. and I won’t get into the numbers, but some of the expenses have been out of my control, including attire for the cultural aspects of the wedding.
Sometimes, all the expenses of the wedding have led to me freaking out over going into more credit card debt than I’m comfortable with. They’ve made me a bit nervous over everyday expenses like the mortgage, utility bill, phone bill, and car among other things.
But it (hopefully) only happens once and is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I have been reminded that especially since we have so many people coming to the wedding, we get a lot of the money expenditures back through gifts. And also, again, it only happens once and is meant to be a lot of fun.
Obviously, I have a lot to say about the financial expenditures of the wedding and could say a lot more about how we as a society have rationalized spending five-digit numbers on weddings, or how people within the wedding industry (who tend to be very nice, for the record) have been able to charge so much. But that’s a story for another time, and it’ll never be easy to see four-digit numbers leave your bank account for something that’s not necessarily essential for everyday living.
Other concerns include making sure my hair looks good and my beard is well-trimmed. This week, I received my wedding suit I ordered in early April. Yes — I received it almost a month and a half late. Of course, I should have ordered it earlier, but we had some developments where we had won a free wedding suit at a raffle but the person ended up being unavailable due to his wife’s surgery.
When the suit came, something was up. It didn’t look the right suit when I unwrapped it from the box. The suit was supposed to be green, and my fiancee worried that it wasn’t actually green. I thought something like “no, they wouldn’t send us the wrong suit. It’s probably just the reflection of the light against the suit.” After I took the suit out of the box, my fiancee was right — the suit wasn’t green. It was brown.
With this being Monday and five days before the wedding, I was unusually calm about it. I figured everything would be alright because the suit shop would feel so bad about sending the wrong suit that they would hastily arrange for me to get a new one. They also told me I could keep the brown suit for free, so now I have an extra brown suit I don’t know what to do with or what occasion I would wear it to.
The owner of the store did feel extremely bad. But logistically, the store could not make the suit within the two-day timeframe I needed it. This would have caused a lot of people to panic, but I’m a pretty solution-oriented person, and they seemed to be willing to do whatever it took to rectify the issue. Since it didn’t look like they could make a completely new suit and ship it by the time I needed to have the suit tailored and altered, I offered to come into the suit shop myself and just pick one out.
They agreed to that offer, and I went in, found something I liked that happened to also be my size (and a suit my fiancee really liked), and went home. It worked out pretty well considering I had the wrong suit five days before the wedding. I got it tailored the next day and I’m going to pick it up in a couple of hours.
I haven’t really had any existential concerns of “am I sure I really want to get into this?” or “am I sure I’m making the right decision?” I’ve been engaged for almost two years and have had plenty of time to think about those things and work out any concerns I had during counseling, and my fiancee and I have spent so much time together and lived together for so long that we’re essentially married already.
Most of my concerns about getting married are more logistics-related and not very sexy or romantic hardships. My biggest worry for the day is that I don’t mess up my vows or mess up on the dance floor. I very much know you shouldn’t worry about making a good impression and worry about what other people think of you during your own wedding. I’ve been to other people’s weddings and know the stress that was on them and was worried about just conversing with the people at my own table and having a good time myself rather than focusing excessively on the performance of the people getting married.
Still, even if other people aren’t putting me under a magnifying glass, I feel like I’m putting myself under the magnifying glass. In terms of not messing up my vows and not embarrassing myself dancing, well, we have two days.
I still want to reiterate that the rest of our lives being married is a lot more important than one event. Life goes on after the wedding and my fiancee and I do not have the perfect relationship, and no one does. We love each other very much and love spending time together, but we still struggle with discussions about money and division of housework, and different cleanliness standards, like a lot of married couples do (including our own parents). I’m sure once kids get in the mix, we’ll have differences of opinion, too.
Regardless, we’ve spent almost two years and a crazy amount of money to plan the day. It would be a disservice to ourselves not to enjoy it and just focus on ourselves during the day.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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