weddings.
DISCLAIMER: THIS IS A POST BY A SINGLE PERSON FOR SINGLE PEOPLE. If you’re married or engaged or soon-to-be either of these things, of course I’m not talking about you. I’m talking in general and about people who aren’t you. So: if you are not a single person and you choose to read on, YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO GET UPSET AT ME because I warned you that THIS IS NOT FOR YOU. VERY OPINIONATED OPINIONS LIE AHEAD.
Cool.
#WeddingHashtag
One of my least favorite things about weddings in this gross technology era have been the advent of wedding hashtags.
Wedding hashtags are terrible. It’s usually trying to work the names of the betrothed into some sort of joke/pun/common phrase and it doesn’t really work, like 90% of the time.
People spend way too much time trying to figure out their wedding hashtag, and then they tag literally every post that they post with it for the six months leading up to the wedding. If you google “wedding hashtag funny idea” you get over 400,000 results. Please don’t do this. I’m begging you.
I know that this may come off as a little hypocritical, because I have my own hashtags: #amvsfood (for food) and #amberacrossamerica (for when I travel). But they are not one single event, as weddings mostly are. If you want a hashtag so you can check every photo that your loved ones post, GO FOR IT. But DON’T TRY TOO HARD to make it rhyme or be funny or punny. BE USEFUL. Something like #JenBen62516 works PERFECTLY.
But because this will never not be A Thing anymore, Blair and I will do a “terrible wedding hashtags we saw on the internet this weekend” every Monday morning until our digital ferrets cause an uprising and kill us.
Lingerie showers
Lingerie showers are disgusting.
I will happily buy you an iced tea dispenser or place settings or whatever. Hell, I’ll get you Christmas linens if that’s what you want.
But you are a grown woman.
Generally speaking, I am not your best friend. I think I’ve only met your husband-to-be once or twice. We are the types of friends who could very easily drift apart. I’m happy you want to include me.
Buying your underwear is weird.
Depending on where you live, you may have not heard of this phenomenon before. The “fun party” is because of virgin brides, where they probably haven’t had the opportunity to buy themselves pretty and sexy underthings. Almost every young woman I know who has gotten married in the last three or four years has had one of these and it just kind of…seems strange to me? Like a bridal shower, sure! But often grandmothers and mothers and random cousins will be there too. I wouldn’t want my grandma seeing my sexy underwear that my friend bought me! I don’t want *anyone* seeing that.
But this isn’t a bachelorette party and it isn’t a bridal shower so it skirts the line between potentially brassy and it’s not a bridal shower, so joke gifts don’t work in this situation.
Sometimes this event is held in conjunction with either the bridal shower or the bachelorette party. You get an invitation that says all of the information on it, like a regular party, but it also includes the bride’s sizes and places they might be registered, which. NO. pLEASE DON’T MAKE ME DO THIS THING.
Though I have never witnessed it with my own eyes, I have heard tell of brides TRYING ON THE LINGERIE DURING THE LINGERIE SHOWER.
Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope.
The next time I am invited to one of these, I will buy the bride a lovely floor-length flannel nightgown. Plaid. With long sleeves with ruffles on the wrists.
And then hopefully nobody will ever invite me to one again.
Plus One (or Plus None)
There are few things as complex as actually going to a wedding when you’re single.
While it’s “polite” to allow your single friends to bring a guest to a wedding, because of budgetary reasons and also only wanting your loved ones at the ceremony and reception, I understand why I don’t often get this courtesy extended to me:
According to The Rules of Etiquette In Society For Humans, unmarried adults automatically get to bring a guest to a wedding under the following conditions:
1. You are engaged to be married
2. You live with your partner
I obviously meet neither of these criteria, so I go to weddings alone, albeit with friends in attendance.
Sometimes it’s okay, sometimes it’s terrible. Weddings are hard enough as it is, and even if I’m happily third-wheeling it with friends, there are times, like dancing, that it just hurts my soul to be sitting there alone. And then there’s the singles’ table, which, gag me with a friggin’ spoon. The singles’ table is like an adult version of the kids’ table, where you don’t quite meet all of the items on the grading rubric to qualify as a Full Adult and sit at a regular adult table.
I just try to grin and bear it. I was in a wedding earlier this year, and I dealt with being alone while everyone else was on the dance floor with their partners by breaking down and cleaning the bride’s room and getting all of the gifts to the car.
I wish they would play music that a single person can dance to without a partner or knowing the line dance, because I have flashbacks to my prom where I didn’t have a date and sat at the table drinking punch every time I go to a wedding.
If you do happen to get a plus-one, you have to decide whether or not you’re going to bring someone. It’s a complex thought process and I’m just going to let Older Bob Saget Ted from season 1 of How I Met Your Mother explain it.
“When you’re single, and your friends start to get married, every wedding invitation presents itself with a strange moment of self-evaluation: “Will you be bringing a guest, or will you be attending alone? What it’s really asking is, “Where do you see yourself in three months? Sitting next to your girlfriend, or hitting on a bridesmaid?”
If you’re in new-ish relationship, bringing someone to a wedding is a really big step, one that a lot of people read a lot into. If you’re bringing someone to a wedding, it usually means you’re serious about the relationship, because you’re introducing them to friends and/or family. So when I’m playing tinder on my phone and people are saying that they make a great wedding date, I have to scratch my head a little bit.
Also, don’t EVER ask the bride or groom if you can bring a date to a wedding you were invited to without one. I have seen it done, and it is horrifying to witness as a human adult. I know it’s frustrating, but that’s just tacky as hell.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME DANCE TO SINGLE LADIES.
I am a person. Most of my life decisions are good ones. Why am I subjected, at every wedding, to someone — usually a groomsman — saying ALL THE SINGLE LADIES GATHER ROUND to fight each other for a thing of flowers to the strains of Beyonce through an often questionable sound system?!?! (who is ~happily~ married, by the by. Lemonade may have happened, but homegirl has a man and she stayed with that man and also I feel like that song is SUPER UNFAIR because of it. SOME OF US DON’T EVEN HAVE A MAN TO PUT A RING ON IT)
I digress.
The bouquet toss is weird and kind of vaguely insulting like, “hahahaha the only way you’re getting flowers is if this newly married woman gives them to you because you don’t have someone to buy you flowers.”
The origins of the bouquet toss are frigging weird. In medieval times, women would try and get a piece of the bride’s clothing as something like a good luck charm. Like, you know how saints have relics? Same sort of weird concept.
The older I get, and the more friends of mine are already married, the smaller the “single ladies” group gets, and I get up and get in the pack only because if the bride sees me not in the group, I know she’ll be disappointed in me. I start to feel alone and a little pathetic, as I realize that more than half of the girls around me are considerably younger than I am. Like, still teenagers.
I also don’t get why women get so competitive about this bouquet. The last two weddings that I went to, someone has stepped on my foot. And I’m nowhere near being the person who catches the thing. I may stand a little toward the middle, but I also make sure that there are always people who are taller than I am in front of me. While my feet have been stepped on, I am still waiting for worse injuries to happen out there, like someone knocking me out a la Katherine Heigl’s character in 27 Dresses (but only if James Marsden is there to make sure I’m okay).
Alternatives to bouquet toss (and garter, which is even worse, somehow?): leaving your flowers for Mary if you’re Catholic, using your bouquet as a centerpiece, breaking the bouquet apart and giving it to mothers or aunts or sisters, pulling a Queen Mother and leaving it at the grave of an unknown soldier. Or my favorite, doing a shot with the single people instead.
Please don’t make me do this again.
Dessert Bars are the Work of Satan’s Minions
I know. You love cupcakes. Ice cream. Or pie, or candy. Or weird sodas. But that’s not why I came to your wedding.
I came to your wedding for some FREAKING CAKE.
I am my mother’s daughter. Terri has been known to attend weddings solely for the wedding cake.
If you want to feed me the other things, too, that’s fine, BUT AMBER NEEDS CAKE FIRST AND FOREMOST.
Also, don’t make your wedding cake some stupid flavor. If I wanted banana nut bacon cake, I WOULD EAT BANANAS AND NUTS AND BACON. Things should just be the things they are and not try to be other things.
Acceptable wedding cake flavors:
-Chocolate
-Vanilla
-Yellow
Moderately accecptable wedding cake flavors (if there is at least one from the original list, you may serve these):
-Red Velvet
-Lemon
-Carrot
Also accecptable: having a groom’s cake as several hundred Donut Stop glazed, chocolate, or cherry. (Don’t worry, y’all. I’ll only eat half of them.)
Pinterest is Ruining America
Hear me out.
This one goes beyond just weddings, so I apologize in advance for going a little off the rails, though I think weddings are a cornerstone of Pinterest Culture (tm).
Pinterest is teaching young women that in order to have a “good” life or wedding or home or engagement, or happy experiences in high school, that they have to have everything staged just so, so that it can be shared and fawned over; that all engagements should be surprise with a photographer present, or with a scavenger hunt. That every home should have fairy lights, glass, and reclaimed wood. that you should aspire to refinish your furniture with old fabrics every weekend. or that you should fill fucking LIGHTBULBS with GRAVEL and FAKE PLANTS.
Pinterest gives you ideas for “easy recipes,” that “change the game,” but involve way too many components. A cake that has 10 layers of various colors tastes BASICALLY THE SAME as a cake you make from a box for $2. but according to pinterest, that’s not okay.
According to the aesthetic you see on pinterest, everything has to be white and glass and open. Are we never allowed to have clutter? or mess? that our bathrooms should be like spas, and baby’s rooms should have cohesive *everything*. Pinterest tells us that weddings have to be DIY with personal touches everywhere, from the church decorations to the centerpieces.
But what if something in your life isn’t like a pinterest board, because you don’t have endless time and endless money?
They don’t tell you that, and they don’t tell you how to temper expectations, and the sheer feeling of being overwhelmed when things don’t go or look exactly like your idea board.
It’s not realistic, and like everything else on the internet, people only share the “good” things, and it’s now gone to the point where it has to *look* good, like it’s not subject to the things we deal with we have in ordinary life.
Pinterest makes me really angry. and I know that we, as young women, buy into it, because it’s marketed to us, and it targets people who want to do everything our parents did but more and better.
Pinterest creates unrealistic expectations for young women who don’t have the resources to make everything look the way it “should.” and that leads to feelings of inadequacy and failure…something that young women already experience too much of.
Nobody cares what your wedding centerpieces look like. You are the one who cares the most. As long as it’s not obtrusive, people will look at the things on the centerpieces, acknowledge them, and forget about them.
Don’t make your life like a pinterest board. Make your life a life. That means it’s a little messy and incomplete and less than perfect. You’ll be happier.
“They had a cash bar! I hope they can’t have kids!”
Cash bars are tacky. I understand getting 150 people drunk isn’t cheap. I appreciate it, even.
But please don’t make me pay for booze: I already traveled across the country. I bought a new dress so I don’t look the same in your wedding pictures as I did at [last friend to get married]’s wedding. I bought you a freaking $100 toaster. Do me a solid and pay for my coors light.
It is possible to have a nice wedding without alcohol. I’ve been to two in the last year alone. If you can’t afford a package, consider doing no alcohol at all.
Or, do alcohol for a couple of hours and then close up shop. Or do beer and wine. Or a signature cocktail. There are so many ways to not force me to go to a cash bar at a wedding.
Do what you can afford, but, like, guests need to feel comfortable at parties. Weddings are parties. I WILL TIP THE BARTENDER, BUT DON’T MAKE ME PAY FOR THE DRINKS.
I WANT AN EFFING KITCHENAID MIXER, TOO.
In the recent past, the point of a gift registry was to make sure that a couple had all of the things that they need for their home, as they’ve not lived on their own and made a home before. But as the age of first marriage creeps closer to 30, the number of people who haven’t lived on their own before marriage is close to zero.
What that means in practice is that the disparity of decor between the homes of single people and married people grows and grows, because when you get married, you can ask someone else to buy you a fancy-ass knife block or matching chrome bathroom accessories (because anyone actually needs a stainless steel bathroom garbage can). But I can’t ask someone to buy me a Le Cruescet dutch oven, because that’s insane.
A friend of mine has some pretty bonkers kitchen supplies. When I asked her about it, she said something along the lines of, “just get married. people will buy you insane things for your kitchen.” Among my favorites in her kitchen are:
-the PB&J spreader
-the universal fit knife block
-the footed egg masher, which I’m p sure she only uses for guac
No one needs any of these things, but because she got married, people were like, “OH WE NEED TO BUY THEM SOMETHING LET’S GET WEIRD KITCHEN SUPPLIES.”
Because adults are living on their own for longer before getting married, they have the things they need for their home, and now register for things they want. I have purchased board games, camping supplies, stationary sets, and a few other very non-traditional wedding gifts for friends in the last few years.
A woman I know in Texas thinks it’s tacky to register for anything other than china and linens, and will refuse to buy anything other than that. To each her own, and this high horse that Lisa got on while telling me this is one of my favorite things that has ever happened.
Don’t get me wrong, the thing I see most often is still upgrades of entry-level kitchen and home products. They’re making me feel like garbage with my now-chipping and cracking $20 16-piece set of dinnerware that I bought from walmart in mid-2010. It has done well, but it’s six years old and I’m pretty sure if I get many more paint flecks into my jellybeans that I’ll probably die in the near future.
Realistically, I’m at least five years out of getting married. Probably more. I want new home goods. If you’d like to combat Single People Home Goods Disparity, please contribute by purchasing something from my anniversary (of my birth) registry.
I fully recognize that this is insane, but it’s my way of throwing it out there and evening this crap out and win a victory for the unmarried among us.
IN CONCLUSION
I leave you with the following exchange that happened between my mom and her friend Trina in February of 2015:
trina: i wish amber would get married soon so we can help plan the wedding!
terri: amber would have to leave her house to meet a guy first.
trina: you’re right. i just want to help with all the pretty things!
terri: maybe the boys will get married before amber?
trina: yeah, but the girls will want to do it with THEIR moms.
(please note that the boys are three and six years younger than I am. Thanks for the vote of confidence, there, mom.)
