Save The Date

We are now up to the Save The Date portion of the wedding preparations. Which, now that I think about it, does seem to be a somewhat tautologous practice. Basically because by the time most people get around to the Save The Date bit, they have already gone and booked the wedding venue and the reception. Or maybe thats just us...? And, if you already have the information regarding the times and locations for both your ceremony and your after party, why wouldn’t you just send out an invitation?

One argument for this is that invitations are best sent out at a date closer to the actual affair so they don’t get lost or forgotten etc . The Save The Date card is therefore a way to ensure that people don’t double book themselves in advance of receiving said invitation. One might also argue however that if the person to whom an invitation was sent quite early was close enough to you that you really wanted them at your wedding, they wouldn’t be likely to forget the date in the first place!

So anyway, despite the fact that we currently have both a ceremony and a reception venue, we have opted to send out Save The Date cards to our nearest and dearest. We came up with a concept that we liked and did the artwork ourselves which had the dual result of providing something personal that The Boy and I created together and facilitating one of the biggest disagreements we have had with each other over this whole wedding process so far. Who would have thought this would hold such potential for headaches and misunderstandings!

We actually really like what we came up with in the end. It did result in us making a couple of shameless infringements of copyright here and there but the final idea struck us as quirky and fun and we hope that other people will like it too. Getting to this point however took a bit of effort. It definitely didn’t help that we tried to do this late at night but our artistic sensibilities, or at least the manner in which they are manifested seem to...clash. Or maybe its a men are like waffles and women are like spaghetti thing but the longer we were working together, the more frustrated I was and the more irritated he became with me. Or maybe that was the more frustrating I became, the more irritating he was...?

I like to start work with a blank canvas, adding components here and there, visually comprehending what looks good before rearranging it to suit the final edit. The Boy likes to have a full brief in advance, knowing all the requirements and limitations in detail so he can manipulate it all together and come up with the best possible version. Both are completely valid and effective approaches. Pity they don’t particularly work well with each other. He didn’t understand that I couldn’t tell him exactly what I wanted until I’d actually seen it in order to know whether I liked it or not. Since he had commandeered the laptop, that left me as the backseat driver only. I could quite easily say that I didn’t like where we were going but I felt unable to actually do anything about it. And apparently its extremely unhelpful to tell someone that you don’t like something when you can’t offer an alternative.

Towards the end of the process, there were quite a few impassioned words as to whether I was completely contradicting myself constantly and whether he was being totally unfair. We did get through it however. Obviously. He put up with my hissy fit when I got fed up and told him I didn’t care anymore and he could do what he wanted. And I think I managed to impress upon him that if he wants to work with me on something then he can’t just take over. And then we all lived happily ever after. We also got a website.

It started off as a bit of a gag because we ripped off an ad which had a web address for the save the date card. We then figured that if you put a website address on the card you were giving to friends then it may as well actually go somewhere in case they checked it out. So we set up that as well. Or rather, The Boy set that up and I provided artistic direction from the back seat. Fortunately for both of us, this process was a little smoother than the Save The Date cards. So now, we just need to get the cards printed and distributed so that we can honestly say that in the long list of wedding associated duties. Another one bites the dust!

Be Prepared

Like every good girl scout or boy scout knows, throughout life one must always “Be Prepared”. So as The Boy and I now head off into this adventure of marriage together, that is precisely what we did this weekend. We got “Prepared”.

I’m not sure if it is true of every denomination today but I think its fairly common now that if you wish to be married by a member of the clergy within a church, you are required to take part in some form of marriage preparation. For us this is going to be two days across a weekend spent with similarly pre-wed couples as we learn about...well actually, I don’t really know what we are going to learn about but I assume it will have something to do with conflict resolution and maintaining open lines of communication within a marriage. You know, do not call each other names, its not productive and all that jazz. Oh, and probably some stuff on sex-ed thrown in as well. What this so called preparation also meant for us however was a long questionnaire to identify what our individual views and expectations were heading into the marriage. This was called Prepare.

When we sat down to have a chat with the Rector of the church, he stressed that there were no right or wrong answers in this questionnaire. We couldn’t actually fail. It wasn’t a test and it wasn’t designed to ascertain whether our marriage is going to last or even whether we should be getting married in the first place. Although I think if they ever find an accurate way of measuring that, it could save a lot of people significant heartache and money! Anyway, the purpose for which this questionnaire was actually intended was to highlight over a broad range of issues within marriage what our “areas of strength” and our “areas of growth” were. Don’t you just love that? We’re not going to have areas of “weakness” in our marriage. That would just be too depressing. We are going to have areas that require “growth” instead.

So we were given our booklets which actually contained no questions at all but rather statements to which we could strongly disagree, disagree, agree or strongly agree. Unless of course we couldn’t make up our minds and were undecided. We had to fill out our answers by colouring those little circles on a separate answer sheet and it was just like being back in high school. We were told that the answers should be our first or gut response and though we were encouraged to discuss our answers with our partner after we had completed all the questions, we were to refrain from discussing anything while we were actually filling it out. Which was a completely unrealistic expectation when he left us alone sitting right beside each other on the couch!

To be fair, we didn’t actually ask or mention to each other what answers were being given but there were several points during the process where one or the other of us would burst out laughing and just have to tell the other one what number we were up to in the booklet. Which also made the process a bit of a race to see who could finish first (I lost). I can’t remember now all the statements that we found hilarious but I have a feeling that many of them were related to expectations of the marriage. Probably statements like “Once we are married we will have a perfectly smooth relationship”. I think my first reaction to statements like that is how dumb would you have to be to put the answer “yes”!? I don’t know ANY married couple who has had a perfectly smooth relationship. I think disagreements come with the territory. Well, you know, unless you’re a doormat.

So we filled out the 160-odd responses so that some little computer could tally up our stance on whether we thought women with children should be in the workforce, doing most of the housework and having personal hobbies of their own. Whether we had discussed with each other how we were going to spend our money, who was responsible for taking out the trash and the roles our extended family would play in our lives. And in the end, I think that is what they really wanted to know. About the discussion I mean. Not who was going to be taking out the trash. Everybody will have their own views and opinions and not all of them are going to be perfectly in synch so what they want to be able to see as you head into your marriage is what the most likely areas that you may experience pitfalls are and have you been able to (or can you) discuss them openly.

Going into the Prepare booklet, I thought we had it covered. We’ve pretty much discussed everything at some point or another so we know where the other one stands on a lot of issues. When it came to reading the wording of the statements however, there were some that I realised I wasn’t completely positive about. There were also those that, because of the wording, I probably gave an answer that could be taken out of context such as whether I agreed that a mother should stay at home because children require a full time parent. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t really matter which parent stays at home and since The Boy and I have discussed the possibility of him not working if I could potentially earn more and we could afford it, I didn’t actually "agree" with the statement.


On the whole though, I think we are pretty much in accord with each other on how we intend to be as man and wife. There is a lot we have yet to learn, sure, but we have a strong basis of communication in our relationship already and even though we definitely don’t always see eye to eye, we do always talk about it. Eventually at any rate. When we were discussing everything on the way home, we seemed to have felt the same way about a lot of things. One of the things that I found interesting though was that I often to look at things like this more in black and white than shades of grey and I tended to strongly agree or disagree to a large number of the statements. The Boy on the other hand stayed a lot closer to the centre. We have yet to speak to the counsellor about our results, which may well be another entry in itself, but having now gone through the "Prepare" booklet, I do think it was a worthwhile experience.

If The Shoe Fits

Ok, so who was the bright spark who decided that it was a great idea to buy a wedding dress in an obscure colour huh? I mean its all very well to want to be a little bit more original and to not be frocked up in the traditional white or the ubiquitous shades of ivory but really...If you’re still wearing a “wedding dress”, why couldn’t it be a more common shade? Choosing “Antique” for the colour of the dress was just silly. How are you supposed to find accessories to match that!?!

Now its either a mark of how tired I have been recently or how much the little details of the wedding have been starting to wig me out but I am actually dreaming about some of this stuff now. But I didn’t have one of those dreams where I start walking down the aisle to the shocked expressions of all our friends and family because I have forgotten to put on my wedding gown and am in fact buck naked. No. I have a dream about walking down the aisle in my dress which is now mysteriously about 7 inches shorter than it used to be so that you can see I am wearing a pair of low heeled metallic pewter courts from the 80’s with white bobby socks. A combination which is more than worthy of being pulled up by the fashion police. Or anyone with any aesthetic sensibilities whatsoever.

So apparently I have issues about shoes. Who’d have thought? And to add insult to injury, whilst looking for the wedding shoes (which we now are), its not just the right colour that we have to find either. There are a number of other considerations that have to be taken into account. The first of which being, I am not allowed to wear 3 ½ inch heels. I can’t remember exactly how tall I am but for a woman, I’m definitely not short. Therefore, 3 ½ inches worth of heels will in turn make me 3 ½ inches taller than I already am and as I have been told, that is just too tall. Now I know that this is not supposed to matter these days but it so does. Not to everyone sure but I was both sexist and sizeist when it came to choosing my partner in life – so sue me.

The next thing on my list is closed toes. I can see some of the males I know going “what the..?” but its really not a complicated concept. It is merely the absence of ridiculous and girly, strappy pieces of footwear making my feet look like I’ve tried to cut off all circulation. There is also the added benefit that in winter, if I have to walk over wet ground it will keep my feet a little drier and I have the option of wearing stockings with impunity. I probably think far too much but I am of the opinion that its kind of tacky to wear stockings if you can see the seem that runs around the toes. Its kind of like wearing tights with a skirt where the waistband of the tights rests higher than that of the skirt and is clearly visible. There seems to be a general consensus amongst male youth that its cool to flash your underwear from underneath your pants but it doesn’t really fit the dress code of a wedding.

Of course, no one is actually supposed to be looking at my feet and the dress touches the floor as it is so this all sounds like a lot of bother over nothing. As long as I stick to something fairly flat, you’d never know what I had on under the dress. I did actually run the idea of thongs past The Boy though which I could do for free cause I already own them but he said no.