Single Digits

Wow. So it's been another long hiatus in my little blog, but for good reason. As this destination wedding has been getting closer and closer things have really been moving quickly. It's so funny; we have been engaged since August of 08, almost 2 years, and when we got engaged we almost immediately started planning for this destination wedding. It seems like just yesterday we would be speaking with friends and family and they would ask "when's the big day?" and we'd respond "oh, not til May of 2010, we still have plenty of time." Up until about a month ago this creature has taken a life of its own. It went from a little puff of smoke on the horizon to a steam engine locomotive barreling down on us at full speed, and we have no way of getting off the tracks now. And I'm not saying that we want to get off the tracks; we're both very excited to be marrying each other and this whole process has just solidified our relationship, I'm just saying that after all of this planning and time, this thing is finally right here, in our faces, and it's a lot bigger than we imagined it would be. I'm not quite sure how this happens to couples. Everyone tells you that planning the wedding will be this huge ordeal full of minor and sometimes major hiccups and it tests the relationship and yada yada yada...and all couples go home and tell each other the same things. "It won't be that crazy for us. It'll be intimate. No big crazy elaborate wedding for us. And we won't disagree about petty stuff like other couples." And then, before you know it, you're fighting over how many light blue ribbons to buy to put on the custom-made cupcakes for all 730 of your closest friends. It's simply inevitable. You will disagree. You will invited 20% more people than you thought. You will spend 40% more than you thought. And it will still be over way to quickly.

My dry erase board in my office has had a countdown on it since I moved in about 50 days ago. It's now down to single digits. Every time I look at it I'm excited and a little scared. I think the biggest thing a groom has to deal with is making sure that everyone else is happy. After all, we're not the bride, who's been thinking about this day forever and needs it to be _perfect_. We're not either set of parents, who have also thought about this day for a long, long time and have also paid a lot of money to help it happen (if you're a lucky couple, and we are, while we're paying for the actual wedding ourselves, our parents are helping us in different and amazing ways, thanks guys). It's the groom's job to make sure things are going smoothly and everyone's mingling and having a good time. While I'm a very social person, we have 80 guests, some of whom I've never met. It's hard to make that many people happy, and I think the most important thing for brides and grooms to remember is that not everyone is going to be happy with everything. There will inevitably be bumps in the road along the way, but it's so important to remember that those little things are sometimes the best and most entertaining memories. After all, there's no such thing as perfectionblog.com, but failblog.com gets millions of hits. Your friends and family don't want to witness something that's a cold, stagnant, over-produced piece of perfection; they want to be a part of something that they can see you put your blood, sweat and tears into. They want to see you winging it, in all your imperfect glory, because that's the truer representation of how the rest of your married life will go. The cake's not always going to be perfect and you might step on her toes during the first dance, but you're there, together, trying like hell to make it perfect and laughing and loving it when it isn't. Too much pressure for a perfect anything leads you into failure more times than not.

While I would love to have the perfect wedding where nothing goes wrong and I am going to do everything I can to assure that happens, I'm not going to go crazy if something does go wrong. Because after all, even though this locomotive is steaming right towards us, it's much easier now to realize that it's on a different set of tracks next to us and going in a different direction. In a very, very short time that locomotive will be long gone, replaced by memories, but we'll still be in the car together traveling the same road for a long, long time to come.