Chief Duties of the Bride's Parents
Welcome the bridegroom to the family, and relieve his anxiety by telling him how they would now like him to address them. Gently explain the facts of life to the bride: That the wedding must be within the financial capabilities and general style of the way the family lives, not a bankrupting fantasy; that the ordinary considerations of respect for parents, obligations of relationship and friendship for family and attendants, and concern for the comfort and pleasure of guests are not to be suspended; that marriage is supposed to be forever; and that yes, in this day and age, people still expect prompt handwritten thank-you letters.
Act as hosts to the extent agreed upon in family council with the bride (who must bear in mind that presiding is not indissolubly linked with paying): Planning the rehearsal, wedding reception, and any auxiliary entertaining; issuing the invitations and announcements; arranging for the officiant, site, flowers, music, food and drink, transportation, and clothing of the bride and her attendants; and suggesting accommodations for the wedding party.
4. Restrain their own temptation to use the occasion to settle old scores, for example against each other's present spouses.
5. Veto black dresses or period costumes for the bridesmaids; head off any attempts by the bride to request showers or dictate wedding presents; remind the bride never to drink to herself when she is being toasted; and brief her on what to expect on her wedding night, if she does not have her own children to do this.
Chief Duties of the Bridegroom's Parents
1. Call on the bride's family (in person, if possible; otherwise by letter, E-mail being not formal enough for the occasion), propose a meeting, and declare how lucky they believe their son to be.
2. Keep up that tone, true or not, pronouncing everyone and everything perfectly lovely, while channeling any complaints they have about the arrangements through their son to the bride.
3. Supply an accurate copy of their guest list, without abbreviations or question marks, and keeping to the limit set, knowing that they can always give a party during the engagement or after the marriage to introduce the bride to their hordes of friends.
4. Joke about how unfair it is that the bride's family has so much more to do than they, and offer to help out, usually by entertaining the bridal party, officiant, all their spouses, and, if possible, the out-of-town guests, the night before the wedding.
5. Spare the bride the necessity of reminding the bridegroom to buy her engagement and wedding rings, to let her know tactfully whether or not he would like a wedding ring, to get the license, to order the bridal bouquet and boutonnières, to pay the officiant, to choose the best man and groomsmen, to talk them out of protesting about what they are expected to wear, to give them presents, and to throw the bachelor dinner, if they have not already planned one for him.
Chief Duties of Stepparents
1. Step into parental roles when invited to do so but refrain from sulking if not.
2. Maintain a graceful balance between parental pride and deference to birth parents, no matter how unworthy of honor they may be.
Money and Happiness
Clumping up and down the aisle, stalking the "Father of the Bride" and the other genial characters in the most recent version of the movie by that name, is the traditional American wedding curse. It is the firmly held notion that when a young woman falls in love, her parents will fall in debt.
Beneath a benevolent family story, the point is dramatically made that any wedding to which people attempt to apply the ordinary budgetary restraints appropriate to their circumstances will be pitiful and unmemorable. Parents who care for their daughters should not even hesitate to capitulate to such possibly ruinous demands as $1,200 wedding cakes and $250-a-head dinners, it argues. The mother of the bride makes the point that attention to prices spoils the bride's pleasure in her wedding.
Then the folly of doing so is demonstrated when the few limitations on expenditures or cheaper alternatives on which the father has insisted result in disaster. By not buying the most expensive clothes for himself, he has had a dark blue dinner jacket foisted off on him as black and is ridiculed by everyone, even the neighborhood policeman. That person is there to threaten the event because the other saving, having only two valet parking attendants instead of four, has induced presumably disgusted guests to leave their cars illegally blocking the street.
In this case, the family has enough money to propitiate demanding commercial interests. Both parents run successful businesses and, as the mother points out, they don't travel or indulge in other luxuries. So, in a tender scene when the father catches the daughter reading budget tips, he vows not to put her through the humiliation of a reasonably priced wedding.
It is not Miss Ultimate Wedding's function to save people money they want to spend. So she would have happily ignored all this, were it not for the heavy insinuation that the driving force behind all this is—poor old etiquette. Etiquette was portrayed as the villain—the handmaiden of commercialism, whose insidious ceremonial and emotional arguments always favored the spending of extravagant sums of money. It is made to seem rude to ask prices for commercial services and incorrect to limit wedding expenditures, even when they include planting tulips in the snow and making live swans waddle across the lawn.
Miss Ultimate Wedding is outraged. Etiquette does not practice extortion. Even the particular rules that were cited as required by wedding etiquette were totally false. Where did they get the claim that the bride's parents must pay the airfare of the bridegroom's foreign relatives? Never mind that his family was shown as richer than hers— transportation for relatives has never been a hostly obligation.
Midnight blue is the only color other than black that is, in fact, not considered vulgar for gentleman's evening clothes. Its justification is the argument, made by highly fastidious gentlemen, that under artificial light, which is the only way evening clothes can be seen anyway, it looks blacker than black.
What Miss Ultimate Wedding resents most of all is the implication that in lesser circumstances—for example, in the only too common event that the parents' businesses happened to be suffering from the recession—the couple could not have had a beautiful and proper wedding. What a thoroughly improper idea that is.
Bill Paying
Q. I have just received the happy news that my eldest daughter is to be wed next year. In view of the fact that her mother and I are divorced, that I am remarried, and that the bride's mother is not, and further that her mother and I are both wage earners, I would appreciate your advice on the following matters.
1. Should the payment of the wedding be shared by both parents? Quite frankly, when I first considered this question, my initial reaction was that this was solely the obligation of the father. However, some similarly situated friends, both male and female, have suggested that there should be an equal sharing of costs. Other friends have said that depending on the financial position of the parties, there should be a division of cost wherein the father would bear more than fifty percent, and still others have even suggested that if the mother is unwilling to bear any of the cost, her relatives be excluded from the guest list unless she is willing to fund the cost attributable to their attendance.
2. In the event that it is your opinion that the mother should share in the expenses of the wedding, what, if any, changes would be mandated vis-a-vis the question of protocol; or, conversely, if the mother should not share in said expenses, what changes in protocol would you suggest?
It goes without saying that the happiness of the bride is paramount, since this is (hopefully) an once-in-a-lifetime experience. But many of my friends have indicated that the expense-sharing concept is realistic and fair, since although the father is the titular payor when the parents are still married, the other actually shares, since the money is derived from joint marital funds or indebtedness of both parents. This logic, to me, seems compelling.
A. Which would you prefer on this occasion, compelling logic or happiness of the bride? As you declared the latter to be paramount, Miss Ultimate Wedding will try to give you as much as possible of the former. Just don't push her too far.
Etiquette says nothing about the vulgar idea of having the financial backing of the wedding reflected in what you call the protocol; it merely throws up its hands in horror. The answer to your second question is: Don't even think about it. The lady in question did not buy the position of mother of the bride, and it cannot be withdrawn from her for failure to pay wedding bills. Also, her relatives happen also to be the bride's relatives, every single one of them.
As a matter of fact, etiquette, which messes around less in the family budget than people seem to imagine, never decreed that wedding bills were paid by the father of the bride. Who signed the checks, whether there was a joint account, and who brought what money to the parents' marriage were things about which etiquette minded its own business. It merely said that the parents usually (but not always) "gave" the wedding.
In the sweet old days that you imagine, the mother of the bride (who may have been an heiress; did you think of that?) did most of the "giving" because she did the planning. The bride, by standing at her side moaning, "Oh, Mother," did her best to influence decisions, but the mother was nominally in charge.
Now the balance of decision-making has been allowed to shift to the bridal couple, even under the best of circumstances. When the parents are divorced, they should try as best they can to make group decisions that will not unduly burden or displease anyone. A family session in which you all discuss the size and style of the wedding would not be an inappropriate place for you to announce that you would like to help realize the plans and to ask your former wife tactfully what she would like to do. Should she not be willing to contribute, you cannot threaten to exclude her in any way, but you can—unless you magnanimously want to ignore the difference that it will make to you—enlist her and your daughter's help in figuring out how to scale down the wedding to what you can afford.
Q. Out son is to be married and the bride's parents have stated that it is proper for the groom's parents to pay for the flowers and the minister's services. We have never heard of this before. Have you?
A. Has your son perhaps heard of young men assuming financial responsibility when they get married? The relevant etiquette rule is that the bridegroom pays for the bridal bouquet and the wedding fee, not his parents. You may want to get this straightened out before someone tells you to go out and buy the bride a wedding ring.
The Family Meeting
Q. Please explain the duties of the groom's parents after the announcement of their son's engagement to a girl whose parents are divorced and unfriendly. I know it is our duty to have the girl's parents to our home. Should we have each parent over separately? Since we have briefly met each one, is it necessary to have them over at all?
A. Miss Ultimate Wedding hopes that you mean that the bride's parents are unfriendly to each other, not to you. She has an unpleasant picture of people whose response to "We're thrilled to hear that our son is to marry your lovely daughter" is a snarl.
In any case, you do want to do what you can to establish a friendly relationship with them. This is necessary on one level because etiquette requires that the bridegroom's parents create an occasion to tell the bride's parents how happy they are over the match. On another level, it is necessary because you need to establish a basis of sociability with people whose lives will be so much connected with yours over such matters as holidays and celebrations and grandchildren, should there be any. Two occasions to do this does not seem excessive to Miss Ultimate Wedding. Obviously, if they can't stand each other, it will not be a good idea to attempt to see them together.
The Night Before
What are you supposed to do the night before the wedding?
Oh, stop giggling. Nowadays, people don't even do that the night of the wedding, judging from the number of weary wedding guests who beg Miss Ultimate Wedding to let them off from the rule about staying at the wedding reception until the bridal couple leaves. Today's bridal couples aren't going anywhere while they still have anyone else left around to entertain them.
The problem of the night before the wedding is quite a different one. Then everyone wants to party. People who came in from out of town don't want to watch the cable movie in the hotel; they want to see who got invited and who got left out. The bridesmaids want to show everyone how good they can look when they choose their own clothes, instead of wearing that awful dress the bride chose, and they want to look over the groomsmen, who want to look over the bridesmaids. Reunited classmates want to find out what jobs their classmates got. Previously united relatives want to see how badly their replacements have aged. The bride's parents want to get away from all those planning books before they go stark-raving mad. Even the bride is torn between the desire not to have bags under her eyes the next day and the feeling that it's stupid to do nothing, especially if there is anyone in town who might otherwise be involved in a form of entertainment that does not feature her at its center.
This is clearly not a time to improvise. The planners of the wedding are so etiquette-logged by this time that they can't cross the street without looking up who should go first. There are so many relatives and friends available that to choose a few would inevitably insult others. So proper people look to tradition to tell them what to do. Then they have a problem. It happens that there are at least three traditions for the same night, involving most of the same people being at different events.
For example, there is the tradition of the bachelor party, and the more recent matching event, in which the bride and bridesmaids, in the noble name of equality, endeavor to out-vulgar the bridegroom and groomsmen.
Then there is the very old custom of the bride's parents' dinner, in which people who are already at the social and financial breaking point are forced to give a major dinner party the night before a major series of events at which they can't figure out how to use the same flowers. And there is the more recent tradition by which the bridegroom's parents give that dinner, which presents them with an opportunity to get even with the bride's family for allotting their side so few invitations to the wedding.
The idea of both parental dinners is twofold: To make sure that the wedding party attends the rehearsal, by tying up their evening; and to make sure the wedding comes off by tying up the evening of the bridal couple. Miss Ultimate Wedding attributes the continuing popularity of the last-night-out party for the bridegroom, and possibly also for the bride, to its stunning potential for outright disaster. One might presume that such a freedom-frolic would lose its zest for couples who have long been keeping house together, but perhaps its likelihood for creating a public cause of complaint between the couple actually adds some needed zest to the wedding itself. In contrast, the bride's parents' dinner would probably only strain the sanity of that couple and their relations with the new in-laws, which is why it has been pretty much dropped. For years, the bridegroom's family got off free financially, on the idea that their son would take over the sole support of the bride, but not even the bride believes in that any more.
An increasing sense that it is only fair for both families to be involved has made the bridegroom's parents' dinner the most usual pre-wedding-night custom now. It is the one that has Miss Ultimate Wedding's vote, since she is squeamish about attending weddings of families in the state of open hostility likely to result from the other options.
She cautions them to remember that they must be just as fastidious about it as if they had been undergoing the rigor that has been driving their counterparts nuts. They must include the spouses and para-spouses of the wedding party, and invite hardship cases—elderly relatives, people who have traveled for months to get there—unless other social provision for these people has been made. It is, everyone should remember, a time to be socially generous to those with whom you are about to become cemented, like it or not.
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