I got engaged.
I know most of you already know, but it also seems like an excellent reason to dust off ye olde blog and regale you with my thoughts about things. (Seriously though, sorry for my absence. I’ve been dealing with cubital tunnel in both of my hands, and it makes my keyboard feel like a medieval torture device. Writers gotta write though, so I’m penning this by hand, and I’m going to make Andrew type it like Tertius typed Romans for Paul. Actually scratch that. Andrew did not end up typing this for me because I took too long to write it. So now I am using the dictate tool on my computer to type it, and my roommates can probably hear me in here and think I’m super weird.)
ANYWAY, I know I owe you a thoughtful recap of our engagement, and I’m working on it. I want to write a bit of a behind-the-scenes look at our past two years if only because Facebook makes things look so much easier than they actually are, and there’s something to be said for sharing your relationship without the filter. (The Instagram filter, people. I will still have the other kind of filter.) But for now I’ll answer the question people keep asking: Were you surprised?
YES! Yes, I was surprised! Andrew literally had to convince me to change out of running clothes to join him for the walk on which he proposed, and I still didn’t see it coming—but more on that in the next post.
For now, I want to talk about wedding planning. Remember this show?
Let it be known that planning an actual wedding is far more fun than planning a theoretical wedding, which I have been doing since I was approximately 12 and first discovered A Wedding Story on TLC. (Yes, the predecessor to Say Yes to the Dress.) My middle-school best friend and I would watch it in our separate houses and then send wedding and bridesmaid dress links to each other on AIM. I saved my favorite options in a FOLDER on my computer like some kind of barbarian because this was B.P., Before Pinterest.
I’ve been at the actual wedding planning thing for less than three weeks, so my opinion may change, but so far I feel like it is super underrated. I’ve had numerous people sympathize with me over what a stressful season this will be, and in some ways it is, but mainly it is SUPER FUN! (I’ve also been told by a bunch of people that they didn’t like being engaged because they just wanted to be married already, but I’m enjoying this stage so much that I’m actually kind of sad to be three weeks into what will end up being only about a 4-month engagement.)
That is right. We are getting married October 21, 2017. OCTOBER TWENTY-FIRST. Save the date. (Unless you aren’t on the guest list, in which case let me pre-apologize. We had to shorten our original list by more than 100 people because apparently things like “area in a room” and “number of seats” are determined by, like, “math” and “fire codes,” which aren’t nearly as flexible as I would like them to be.)
In addition to making guest list decisions, we have also already managed to:
- Pick a ceremony location
- Pick a reception location
- Pick a date (which, conveniently for my family, is Georgia’s bye week)
- Pick a photographer
- Pick our bridal party (another area in which the number included was far less than the number I wanted to include, which was 24)Andrew being a dreamboat and listening to my thoughts. We booked this venue, guys. Don’t worry. My color will not be split pea soup.
As a chronically indecisive person, I am finding this rapid-fire decision-making oddly freeing. It’s not that I’m being flippant—I literally made a spreadsheet with like two dozen photographers and gave them all quality and price grades so I could find the best ratio for heaven’s sake. It’s just that, in being forced to make decisions after only limited research, I’m finding myself MORE satisfied with said decisions than I usually am when I’ve evaluated every facet of every option, which is my M.O. If time were more flexible, I would’ve doubled my photographer spreadsheet, talked to half on the phone, and interviewed past brides of the top 25 percent. And I still wouldn’t be sure about my final choice. For the sake of time, I talked to one on the phone. I also only visited one reception venue. And I didn’t even visit ceremony venues—I just worked off my memory. (WHO AM I!?!?)
As it stands, however, I feel happy with my choices, mostly at peace with my limitations and—more profoundly than usual—the sense that I’m being guided. This is the paradoxical part of chilling out.THIS COLOR. Not the purple cranberry sauce you plop out of a can — the pinkish red cranberry sauce you plop out of a plastic box from Kroger’s prepared foods section. (The fancy kind.) Image via.
This does not come naturally to me, however. I’m still combating my innate indecisiveness, as evidenced by the fact that I keep texting my mom and sister new color ideas. I will almost certainly end up doing cranberry seeing as I think the color of cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving is the warmest, most multi-dimensional color in the world. But then I see blush bridesmaids on my Facebook feed and steely blue bridesmaids on my Pinterest feed, and I start calling into question my visions of red. The true test of my decisiveness, however, will be not my bridesmaids’ dresses, but my own, the hunt for which begins this Saturday. (Actually, as I said, it began when I was 12, but perhaps it will culminate this Saturday.) We’ll just have to wait and see how that turns out.
Other decisions still to be made include: how to structure the timeline of the wedding day, what music to play in the ceremony, what food/catering to get, what music to play for the reception, what decor to use for the reception, whether to send save-the-date and invites (Or just one? Or a hybrid?), what to register for, where to honeymoon, how to do my hair, how to do my makeup, what type of flowers to use, where to get them, where to house out-of-town bridesmaids, whether to put the groomsmen in red or black ties, #whatourhashtagshouldbe, oh, and yeah, WHERE WE’RE GOING TO LIVE. The list is endless. My brain starts doing this every night as I fall asleep—and every morning when I wake up at 4 a.m. and can’t fall back asleep. Still though, right now, it is far more fun than stressful.