Centre Stage

You know, I was kind of happy that the venue we had chosen for our reception didn’t actually include the table centrepieces along with everything else. I figured this meant that I would not be stuck with an arrangement I’d never chose for myself such as the ubiquitous hurricane vase nestled in a wreath of flowers and foliage. Or perhaps flower petals strewn across the table underneath a 3-pronged candelabra. Not that there is anything wrong with either of these designs in and of themselves but when they’re thrown into your package with the token gesture that ‘we’re happy to match the “colours” of your wedding’, they can end up looking, well, just a bit naf really. So I was happy that we’d get to choose our own centrepieces. I know better now.

Inevitably, when The Boy and I go to choose something for ourselves, we pick the most hard to find, obscure, expensive things there are to find out there. Which is so unnecessary but there you go. My friend had huge glasses of M&M’s as the centrepieces at her wedding to represent both her mother and her new mother-in-law whose names both began with M. Simple, colourful, functional, meaningful and inexpensive. We on the other hand found pictures of charming Manzanita branches that formed canopies across the table from which to hang small tea lights and sprigs of birch branches for that winter wedding feel. Which would be fine if we lived in the United States. Which we don’t. So then on the branch idea we started looking at driftwood in artistic shapes and realised that we should be living in Queensland where we could find the right type of wood for free and not pay a hundred dollars for something thats already dead!

After we’d had thoughts about the dead stuff though, we came back around to the live stuff. Or rather a-live stuff. Fish to be precise. I rather liked the idea of having centrepieces with fish swimming around in them. Something simple perhaps. Say a black goldfish and an orange goldfish. In a tall vase with maybe a flower or two submerged in the water for effect. And a floating candle on top. And a few more candles in holders on the table cause I like candlelight. So ok, not all that simple at all after you buy the vases, the fish, the gravel, the flowers, the candles and the candle holders. Not all that cheap either. Especially if you wanted to get lights for the bottom of the vases to give you that glowing look. But everything costs in this industry. Even most of the other options we reviewed as possibilities.

There are some way cool candelabras out there. Massive wrought iron things that look somewhat gothic but appealing nonetheless. There are also some beautiful exotic flowers that have amazing scents and look absolutely stunning. There are collections of elaborate vases, ice sculptures, bonsais and balloons that all would give the room a different look and feel but are just not entirely practical. Or feasible. We’re still yet to find the idea thats just perfect. The one where I’m not irritated that we’ve bought stuff nobody actually wants at the end of the night or that we paid too much for something we didn’t really like and where The Boy is satisfied that we have accessorised befittingly the only wedding that we’ll ever have and that we have created an aesthetically pleasing space around us. The more cynical side of me would say good luck with that but stranger things have happened. And we do live in an area of Sydney that is highly populated by Asians which translates in the wedding business to amen for $2 shops.

I Hear Vegas Is Nice...

It would be unfair to say that my life has been reduced to a wedding because that is not really the case. The wedding does seem to be something I spend a lot of my time talking about now but then you could also argue that I put it out there just as regularly as its brought. You know, like hi, my name is Gauchegirl and in case you wanted to avoid any socially awkward silences, you might be interested to know that I am soon to be having a wedding which is good for at least five minutes of inane small talk...and the fact that the Groom picked the dress should be good for a few more...or something along those lines. In any case, like the white elephant in the room, the wedding cannot be avoided and neither can everyone’s two cents worth that goes with it.

Now I’m not actually bothered by this phenomenon. More confused really. There is quite a dichotomy of views that everyone feels compelled to impart, sometimes in a rather impassioned manner. These responses often contain a variation on the theme if only I knew then what I know now but the riders range from I’d have skipped the whole wedding bit and put a deposit on a house or I’d have just gone all out and done exactly what I wanted. Which is usually a money thing but sometimes is mentioned in regards to certain family or friends that may or may not have been invited to the reception. So yeah, when The Boy and I sit down to consider are we doing the right thing (about the wedding that is, not the marriage), we still haven’t figured that out yet.

I’m sure many would argue that there actually is no right answer though. You can only do what seems right for you at the time and hope that it works out for the best. And maybe some of the responses are more indicative of the length of time that has passed between the wedding in question and now rather than what the better choice would have been anyway. It does seem that its the younger marrieds who tell us I can’t believe we spent that much or did it that way, it would have been easier to just elope. Its often been the older generation that has advocated doing anything and everything you can manage. A life goes on afterwards but you only live once so make the most of it sort of approach. Neither generation (generically) however looks back on their weddings in an unfavourable light.

So the jury is definitely still out. Whether its better to take whatever money you have on you, fly to Vegas and get hitched or beg, steal and borrow as much dosh as you can lay your hands on and throw the event of the century, I don’t know. The one thing everyone seems pretty unanimous about however is that you shouldn’t ever feel pushed into doing something you don’t want to do. Don’t invite people purely out of a sense of obligation. Don’t scrimp on the things that are important to you. Don’t let the hairdresser convince you your “do” is fine if you think you’d have done a better job by hosting a birds nest or fighting with the neighbour’s cat. Don’t listen to anyone telling you that you can’t do something you want to because its just not “done”. And if you really want something for your wedding, then as Nike would say, Just do it!

Fully Prepared

Well we can now consider ourselves fully ‘prepared’ for marriage. As far as the church is concerned at any rate. Our birth certificates have been sighted so that the notice of intent to marry may be lodged more than one month and a day in advance of the date in question (and they know that neither of us are grasping for an Australian passport out of the proceedings) and we have now received our feedback from the ‘Prepare’ exercise.

As there is actually no ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ for this process, we can’t actually say we did ‘well’ (or otherwise for that matter). It appears however that we do have genuine areas of strength as opposed to areas of strength by proxy which is nice. That is we don’t have some level of discord in absolutely all areas but only utter discord in a few of them. Instead, we actually have areas where we really do see eye to eye. Oddly enough however, they weren’t necessarily the ones that we expected.

Once we arrived at the counselling session, we were asked to identify on separate worksheets what we thought would be our three main areas of strength and our three main areas of growth. All the statements to which we had previously responded had been designed to come under headings such as expectations of marriage, personality issues and family etc. Our answers had been sent off for a computer to tally up accordingly and we now had to predict what the final result would be. Or that is the result from that particular day – we were advised that over time, the answers we gave to those statements would most likely change and may have even changed already. Which was also a reason they gave for not giving us a hard copy of the actual results. Apparently its not constructive, especially later in a marriage to bring up things along the lines of “but you said when we were engaged that you were happy that I had hobbies of my own and now you’re complaining that I want to take up macramé three nights a week while you look after the kids!?!”. Or something like that. Anyway, across the board The Boy and I felt that Communication would be one of our main strengths and indeed it was but one might have to question occasionally what we communicate about because nothing else was as unanimous!

It was also odd to find that on a list of 10-12 different categories, on face value I would identify an area as one that required growth whilst The Boy felt that it was one of our main strengths and vice versa. The Boy felt that we did not really have too many personality issues between us as we genuinely liked each other and got along quite well. I on the other hand thought that we probably butted heads more than was actually necessary and this was badly done by us on occasion. Apparently I was correct in this particular instance (it was a primary area of growth for us) however The Boy had it right when he thought that our Relationship Roles were unlikely to cause us major issues. I guess its all a matter of perspective though really and it depends on what information you choose to focus when you are making your decision.

Any imperfections on your good set of anything may stick out more in your mind than those on the ratty old set that you’ve had for years. Just as when say your computer normally works great but then inexplicably freezes you might get a whole lot more irritated than when your old printer that has never worked smoothly the first time around, still doesn’t work properly (no matter how good the finished product may be in the end). I think both of us found this in the results that were presented to us. Just as we saw things that probably do need improvement, we were able to look at something that was already good and think well, it could still better in the grand scheme of things. I guess it was good to know.

I don’t think we really took much more away though. Apparently Financial Management is a bit of a growth area for us and the councillor lady was advising us to set up a budget and identify what our essential living expenses were and therefore what money we would have left over for ourselves and our savings. She was listing things such as food and cars and rent and thinking it was a great solution to our apparent while I was sitting there thinking that the itemised budget we already have would scare the pants off her with the detail that is contained. Any financial issues that we might experience are definitely not going to be for want of an adequate budget. Our main challenge is just sticking to the damn thing!

The other aspects of the session we actually found a little frustrating. These were the assertiveness exercise and the conflict management exercise. For the assertiveness task, we had to list three things that we wished our partner would do more often and communicate that. The partner then had to repeat back what they had heard because apparently when we have an issue we don’t want to know how it will be solved or even if it will be solved, we just want to know that we’ve been understood. I’m sure there are areas in my life where that might apply however for the most part, if I ask The Boy to do something, what I really want to know is if he’s actually going to do it and quite possibly even when. To be honest, if I’m tired and cranky then I sometimes don’t even care if he understands or not.

For the conflict management exercise, I guess it wasn’t so much an exercise but a series of guidelines that are designed to help you resolve conflict. You need to make a time to meet up in neutral space, you need to write down and agree on the actual conflict, you should discuss and note down all the solutions tried to date then you are to brainstorm possible new solutions (without comment or criticism from your partner). After that, you get to evaluate each of the proposed solutions individually and decide on the one that will be the course that you try to pursue. Now I don’t actually think that there is anything necessarily wrong with this approach but neither do I think it would be productive for us to follow each of the steps to the letter. We already have an adapted form of most of these steps which makes up our usual method of conflict resolution. And maybe we’re still too young at this life partner thing because we both seem to think that for some things, you do have to just agree to disagree... At least we’re still resolved on doing that together though.

A Veiled Attempt At Civility

Today is the story of Milliner Man. Or rather, its not so much a story as a comment on some of the people out there who’s sphincters are so tight that it doesn’t seem that they will ever remove the pole that has been (inconveniently) wedged where the sun doesn’t shine! There are unfortunately a lot of them out there. This particular individual however also has the misfortune of being extremely narrow minded. If he has any friends I hope they warn him that he’d best be careful not to let his head ever slip through the eye of a needle while he’s working. If his concentration were to lapse one day, all it would take is a turn of the head and he’d choke himself quite fatally I'm sure.

Thats probably a little unfair actually. Especially as I’ve not actually had the misfortune of meeting this man. I’m sure if you fit into his preconceived notions of the way the world should run then he could be quite accommodating and pleasant. The Boy however has had a couple of conversations with him to date and was definitely not impressed. And therefore, by proxy, I wasn’t all that impressed either.

It all started a while ago when I realised that I was going to have to rethink the veil decision. When we bought the dress, we decided on a cathedral length veil. Thats one that goes beyond the length of the dress and brushes the floor. I tried on an ivory one which just looked dirty against the non-ivoryness of the dress and so we arranged for the veil to be dyed the colour of the dress. All good. When I later considered the fact that I planned to wear an ivory jacket that was clearly not the same colour as the dress over the dress, it occurred to me that I was then going to have exactly the same problem with the veil but for the opposite reason.

There are several possible solutions to this dilemma but to cut a long story short, I saw a picture of a birdcage net veil (a piece of netting that only covers part or all of the face – why not go from one extreme to the other?) and thought that might be the way to go. Of course, the particular netting that I had my eye on is practically impossible to find and when people actually figure out what you’re talking about then the generic response seems to be “I can’t help you, but good luck”. And this was apparently the response that Milliner Man ended up giving but it took some patronising words and un-cooperation to get there first.

The Boy, being the brilliant and wonderful man that he is, has been trying to source the type of netting to which I took a fancy. He has looked at accessory distributors, fabric wholesalers and also artisans that might use said netting. Thus the millinery connection. He looked at the speaker list for a millinery conference to identify who was going to be the more high end purveyor of headwear and came up with a guy near the City and one in the Eastern Suburbs. The one in the Eastern Suburbs told The Boy he wasn’t going to sell him anything because he was saving everything for his brides. Whatever thats supposed to mean. So The Boy rang the other gentleman to enquire as to whether he might be able to assist us in our search. My fiancée was subsequently advised that perhaps he should just get his fiancée to phone up and make a time to come in instead. According to The Boy, this guy may as well have said ‘does your Mummy know that you’re making this phone call’ because he obviously didn’t want to give anyone but the Bride the time of day. When the conversation progressed a bit, it was also conveyed that a ‘cheaper’ option would be to go to another shop which he really felt we’d be better off doing. Well I think that people are often better off not cutting off their nose to spite their face but there you go. What does he think I am? Some two-bit slapper who decided that maybe K-Mart wasn’t the only place I should look for my bridal attire?

Anyway after that terribly auspicious beginning, you’d think that we’d just give the guy the flick. And I’m sure The Boy would have if it wasn’t for the fact that this particular sort of netting has proven extremely difficult to find. The Boy therefore decided to give it another go and make a time to go to the shop in person. Whilst phoning up to make the arrangement however, Milliner Man told The Boy that he had gotten very lucky in his choice of bride if I was the one hard at work while The Boy was swanning off to look at items for the wedding. Which kind of conveyed the attitude that I was no longer thought of as the ‘Mummy’ to approve of what my fiancée was doing when I wasn’t there but the ‘Sugar Mummy’ to send my pet out on an errand. Needless to say, The Boy was a little pissed by this. As far as he’s concerned, yes, he did actually score in his choice of partner although in regards to our wedding, for the fact that I trust his judgement and taste implicitly. As far as I’m concerned, I actually scored too because I have someone who likes doing all this stuff (when he’s not dealing with arrogant individuals) and is good at it.

So we have hit a few stumbling blocks on the road to wedded bliss. Some people seem to find it very hard to understand why The Boy is involved with the wedding planning at all and assume he couldn’t possibly have permission to handle all the details of the day. The fact that he is a pleasant, well spoken individual who is more often than not, more knowledgeable on most wedding issues than I often am apparently makes no difference whatsoever. Oh well, we shall persevere. I still haven’t managed to find what we were looking for or settle on another solution to the problem but I’m sure it’ll get figured out. Eventually. And with a little bit of sarcasm.