Surviving the Slew of Uninformed Experts: An Engagement Story

I’ve not long been engaged to be married, but in that span, I’ve come to realize not only is everybody opinionated, everybody is an uninformed expert about weddings.

On Day One of the engagement, I spent the morning sifting through emails in which friends and relatives have given me dates over the next eighteen months that simply, and I quote, “won’t work for them.”

These emails usually go as such: “So excited for you guys! Having said that, don’t get married on August fourth, seventeenth, twenty-third, or thirtieth.”

On Day Two of the engagement, I received an email from an estranged aunt, “Dear Ben, Congratulations on your engagement! I hope you know that your cousin Margaret has finals on May fourth, so please consider an alternative date for your wedding. Additionally, it’s Julie’s birthday on the eleventh of that month, and on the eighteenth we are considering a trip to Maui — nothing is booked yet, but we’re tossing a few ideas around, so if you were considering May eighteenth for your wedding, reconsider.”

On Day Three, I received a call from my Uncle Gordy.

“Ben!”

“Yes?”

“Congratulations!”

“Thanks.”

“Just so you know, your Aunt Grace and I are selling the house.”

“Is that right?”

“Well, we’re thinking about putting it up for sale.”

“All right.”

“Not right away or anything. And certainly not during the winter — damn hard to sell a house in Minnesota in the winter — so we’re thinking about June. So, if you were thinking about June for the wedding, it’d be better for us if…you know…you didn’t.”

By Day Six the entire summer had been unofficially blocked out by the unofficial plans of my family and friends.

On Day Eight my wife’s friend, Allison, came over for dinner with her fiancé of five years, Phillip. They brought a bottle of champagne, and the four of us toasted with dusty pink flutes my fiancée and I purchased for three dollars at a nearby garage sale.

“Sooooooooo, when’s the wedding?” Allison asked.

“Well…” my fiancée began.

“You absolutely must get married in April. Soooooooo romantic. Spring is underway. Birds are chirping. Isn’t that gleeful? Phillip, tell them how gleeful April is.”

“April is gleeful,” Phillip said in a way that made me feel sorry for him.

“Who’s doing your dress?”

“I think I’m — ” she started to say.

“You absolutely need to use my friend, Veronica. She does the most amazing dresses. And she’ll probably give you a deal. I mean, I haven’t spoken to her since college, but I saw on Facebook she’s doing dresses now and they look soooooooo amazing! Phillip, tell them how amazing Veronica’s dresses look.”

“Veronica’s dresses look amazing,” Phillip said.

On Day Nine, my colleague Bernie approached. “Hey, I heard you were getting married,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Why’d I have to read about it on Facebook, man?”

“What’s that?”

“I thought at the very least you’d let me know you were thinking about it. We have lunch together, man.”

“Sometimes.”

“I thought we were friends.”

“I mean, we work together.”

“Just would have been nice to get a call. When I got engaged, I called everybody. You should really do that.”

“Ok, Bernie.”

“Can I tell you the secret to a successful marriage?” he said. “A happy wife means a happy life.”

“I thought you were divorced.”

“Erroneous!” he said and sauntered off.

On Day Twelve, I was sitting with my fiancée at an upscale cocktail bar neither of us could afford. A woman in her late sixties approached. She had a mink shawl wrapped around her shoulders, her greying hair dyed a cheap orange.

She pointed at the engagement ring with a sour expression and said, “Are you two engaged?”

“We are.”

“Is that a princess cut?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was my grandmother’s.”

“You should really think about getting a princess cut,” the woman said, and then motioned to my fiancée. “It can be very slimming.”

On Day Fourteen, my fiancée and I were told by eleven different people to use eleven different colored wedding invitations.

“You should use eggshell. You should use cream. You should use bone. Taupe. Lavender. Snow. Vanilla. Powder. Ivory. Smoke. And Lace.”

“All right,” I said each time.

“You know where you should go on your honeymoon?” my neighbor said on Day Fifteen. “You should go to Greece. I went to Greece the summer after I graduated college. My father paid for me to go. It was the best. Or Croatia? Have you been to Croatia? It’s absolutely magical. I hear the Maldives are nice. I’ve never been, but I think it would be absolutely magical. Bora Bora is nice. Again, I’ve never been, but wouldn’t that be absolutely magical for your honeymoon? For me, though, it doesn’t get more romantic than — “

“I was thinking of Casablanca,” I said.

“You don’t want to honeymoon there!”

“You’ve been?”

“Gawwwd no,” she said.

Wedding conversations devolved into something closer to turmoil than joy.

Don’t get married in Napa, it’s too touristy.

Don’t get married in Half Moon Bay, it’s too quiet.

Don’t get married at the courthouse, too many degenerates.

After work, I have a standing invitation with the throw pillow on the edge of my bed; and I scream into it, knowing full well when we decide on the eggshell invitations, with American gothic calligraphy, inviting family and friends to an October wedding, for which they’ll eat whole roasted filet with chimichurri and mashed sweet potatoes, and sip sixteen year old Lagavulin, and slurp down sixty dollar bottles of Iron Horse, and watch us drive off in a restored Volkswagen Beetle with environmentally safe, biodegradable soda cans tied to the bumper, which will take us to the Kenwood Inn where we will stay in the Tuscan Suite before we jaunt off to Palermo for an eight-day tour of southern Italy, somebody will undoubtedly call, or post, or text, or tweet that they were the one that suggested the eggshell invitations.