This series is not supposed to be for brides. They are already reading far too many exhortations to pursue that cruelly elusive goal, earthly perfection. Efforts to produce The Perfect Wedding have turned many a perfectly lovely bride into a perfect nuisance to her family, friends, and fiance. One could hardly have a worse prelude to marriage than this notion that one can create one's own idea of perfection through controlling other people and conditions, even for a single day. Anyway, no bride in her right mind, if nature could produce such a wondrous creature, would want her wedding to be The Happiest Day of My Life. This would mean that everything from then on, such as the marriage itself, would be downhill.
With the kindest of wishes, Miss Ultimate Wedding suggests that the bride relinquish this book to others, go put her feet up, and have a nice, fragrant cup of tea.
Oh, all right, dear, here is one last checklist—Miss Ultimate Wedding knows that busy brides are hysterically attached to checklists—but one that is designed to cut down the bride's burden. It is called:
Things a Bride Need Not Trouble Her Pretty Head About
1. Do not worry about who is going to give you a shower. The shower is a lighthearted, nonessential element of an engagement (as opposed to, say, the fiance, who is essential and whose heart should be fixed at this point). In any case, it is voluntary on the part of the bride's friends. They either throw one or they don't, but she can't demand one.
2. Do not worry about whether or not you like your relatives. You have to invite them anyway.
3. Do not worry about how many guests you can invite and still afford to serve your dream menu. The proper formula is to count up the relatives and friends first, and then figure out what you can afford to serve to that number of people.
4. Do not worry about whether people will give you wedding presents that you like. These are presents, after all, not fees paid for the privilege of seeing you get married. Only if guests ask what you want can you reluctantly admit to a preference for a certain style or category (which must include modest things), or to being registered at stores.
5. Do not worry about finding other ways to recoup some of the money spent on your wedding from your guests. You cannot do it.
6. Do not worry about whether the postage stamp on your invitations carries out the color scheme of your wedding. Nobody cares.
7. Do not worry, before you send out the invitations, whether or not the people you invite to your wedding will be able to get there. That's up to them to decide, once you send them the invitation. Later on, you can worry when they don't answer.
8. Do not worry about whether your bridesmaids will match one another, or whether there are the same number of them as there are groomsmen. This is not a parade or a public matchmaking. The idea is to have your friends around you, regardless of whether or not the effect is symmetrical. The attempt to form auxiliary couples for a wedding recessional has driven the affianced cra2y with demands of "Well, I have to have Chris, so you've just got to find somebody else." Not only is there nothing wrong with having pairs of bridesmaids march together at the recessional, but no one is watching by then because their eyes are still misty from sentiment at the ceremony itself, or because they are looking around for their gloves now that the wedding is over.
9. Do not worry about whether your mother will match the bridegroom's mother. They are not a set, either, and can both be trusted to dress properly for the occasion.
10. Do not worry whether every minute of the wedding day will be captured on every electronic means available. It can ruin the occasion, and your friends will not long allow you to make yourself tedious by showing them pictures and videos.
11. Do not worry about "limousine" (there is no polite word for distinguishing pretentious automobiles from ordinary ones) privileges, pew seating, or dancing order. Aside from the general ideas that it is nice for people who are feeble or who are wearing long delicate dresses to get rides, that family watches the ceremony from up front, and that the bridal couple opens the dancing, there are no persnickety rules doling out the honors.
12. Do not worry about whether you have completed all your place settings. The stores will still be open after the wedding. Anyway, a proper bride is too busy writing thank-you letters in the first few months of marriage to put everything away.
13. Do not worry about whether the bridegroom is sufficiently interested in the wedding. He may or may not be, but this is not indicative of whether or not he loves you and whether or not he is ambivalent about getting married. The earliest you would ever need to consult him about such matters again is a whole generation from now, and Miss Ultimate Wedding assures you that your daughter will not be all that interested in whether her father thinks the wedding cake should be vanilla or chocolate.
The Bridegroom's Jurisdiction
Q. My sister's fiance feels he needs to know everything about the wedding plans and have the say-so as to whether it should be done that way or not, even down to where the bridesmaids' dresses will be purchased, what style and color. He even wishes to be present when such choices are made. What exactly is the jurisdiction of the groom-to-be in planning a wedding? By the way, the wedding will be paid for by the bride's parents and each bridesmaid will pay for her dress.
A. Some time during the usual engagement, a tearful,young lady clutching swatches of material goes to pieces and asks her fiance, "What do you mean, that either the pink or the peach bows are okay with you? Don't you even care about your own wedding?" But as your indignation shows, and wise old Miss Ultimate Wedding knew all along, the idea that the wedding is of equal interest to both parties getting married is pretty much a polite fiction. The point is not who pays for it: The father of the bride would be similarly attacked by the mother of the bride if she hadn't been married long enough to know better. No form of egalitarianism wipes out the fact that ladies are ordinarily more interested in the details of ladies' dresses than gentlemen are.
Nevertheless, it is the gentleman's wedding, also, and the right to participate in the planning is his if he wishes to claim it. You should be rejoicing for your sister. For the rest of her life, she will be the envy, when she shops, of ladies whose husbands have dropped them off and run, while hers sits backward on a little gilt chair and helps her choose her clothes.
A Lawyer's Warning
Q. As a divorce attorney, it seems to me that oftentimes it is the couples who were most lavishly and ostentatiously married who are most likely to get divorced. This seems even more true when the parents footed the wedding bill for the children. Indeed, I suspect a strong connection: Those "children" who demand expensive weddings from others are least likely to have the level of responsibility and maturity needed for a successful marriage. I would like to suggest a new set of wedding traditions, the loud protests of the Bridal Industry notwithstanding. How about this:
1. The young couple will pay for their own wedding. If they cannot afford even this, they certainly cannot afford a home, children, and the other usual accoutrements of marriage. Perhaps they should wait (as we did in the olden days) until they are a little better established.
2. The wedding will be paid for out of current income or assets. No one will borrow one cent to "put on" a wedding. If that means a small ceremony followed by luncheon at home, rather than The Dinner Dance of the Century, so be it.
3. No one else will be asked or expected to contribute to the pageant. It will not be some friend's or relative's expected "responsibility" to provide a shower, wedding breakfast, rehearsal dinner, etc. If you can't afford it, don't buy it.
4. No one will wear anything that they can't wear again. This means no rented "penguin suits" for the men; no outrageously expensive purple bridesmaids' dresses with the dyed-to-match peau de soie pumps; no $400 flower-girl dress for a five-year-old who is immediately going to spill orange juice on it.
5. The wedding party, minister, and guests will be allowed to do whatever they are supposed to do within the ceremony, and then to enjoy whatever celebration may follow without being constantly stopped, posed, and required to smile for one or more cameras so that the Pageant of the Century can be recorded for a century. Statistically, half of these photos are going to wind up on the cutting-room floor when the two young stars divorce, anyway.
6. The ceremony itself will be short, simple, and will wed the parties. Weddings are not an appropriate place to proselytize for one's religion, lecture the bridal couple or assembled guests on the duties of a good Jewish husband or Christian wife, or provide family members with a captive audience for their musical talents.
7. Serve soft drinks and spend what you would otherwise have spent on the liquor bill, on a down payment for the house.
8. Guests will refrain from sexual innuendos and from comments about a bride's known or suspected pregnancy. That kind of ill-disguised envy and malice, or simple boorishness, is grounds for immediate expulsion of the offender.
9. Brides will accept and acknowledge each gift with graciousness and gratitude. They will recognize that due to a variety of reasons, not all gifts will be "new" or returnable, and they will never ask for a sales slip or suggest that they will exchange any gift, unless the giver makes the offer. (One-of-a-kind items, such as handmade gifts or artwork or heirlooms, will simply have to be stored in the hope that one's children may like them.)
Guests, conversely, will recognize that their choice of gift may well be a duplicate or in the wrong color or simply not to the taste of the bridal couple and will, where possible, say "I got this at_and will help you to return it if it doesn't fit in with your decorating scheme." 10. Finally, close it down no later than 10 P.M. The old folks will appreciate it, the young folks who want to carouse will go elsewhere to do so, and the bridal couple can start their honeymoon sober and unhindered by Wedding Exhaustion.
A Priest's Reply
Q. As a parish priest, I have come, over the years, to detest performing wedding ceremonies. I am bothered by many of the same factors as the lawyer who wrote to you, and I am saddened and angered by the hurt and waste that accompany so many weddings.
But I quit cheering when I got to his sixth suggestion. More than anything, I resent being used to perform a service for a couple interested only in the romantic aura and clearly impatient with the religious elements of the ceremony.
By training and my own interest, I am intensely involved in many of the most important moments of people's lives. I see marriage as a gift from God, both to the individuals marrying, and to the society in which they live. When I conduct a service in which two people make a public commitment to each other, it is with the conviction that God had a part in making this marriage happen, and will have a part in keeping it together. The wedding is a religious rite, in my case a Christian rite, and I feel prostituted when I am asked to perform a wedding on any other basis.
Those who do not want to hear a religious perspective on what marriage is should ask a public official to conduct it. A pastor, priest, or rabbi is also the official of a religious organization that sees marriage within a religious context.
A Photographer's Lament
The mania for recording special moments on film and tape, rather than in the good old-fashioned memory, has eluded Miss Ultimate Wedding. That this should justify disrupting a religious service particularly offends her, and she has called upon the clergy to take a stand for dignity. Yet Miss Ultimate Wedding occasionally makes a pretense of being fair, and will now present and discuss the photographers' side.
"I try hard to be discreet during the ceremony," reports one photographer. "I never roam around the sanctuary, and I photograph without using a flash.
"I am under the direction of the wedding couple as far as what I do during the ceremony. I have been directed on occasion that they want specific shots taken with a flash during the nuptials, such as giving roses to their parents, or an overall shot from the balcony.
"To say that taking photographs during the ceremony should be banned is ridding the bride and groom of memorable shots of the actual ceremony with all the guests watching. Some of these shots just cannot be staged. If you had to stage all the shots of the ceremony, it would literally take at least two hours after the reception line. The same people who are complaining about the photographer during the wedding would be complaining about how long it is taking for the wedding couple to get to the reception so they can eat.
"The photographs I take during the wedding are very important to the couple, and they are paying to have them done. The privileged people who have been invited to share this moment as guests should realize this, and not be rude by talking negatively about how the couple choose to perform their ceremony."
The president of a photographers' association advances even a more solemn argument: "For hundreds of years, images and statues of religious figures have been used by the churches to help people relate to their God. Wedding photographs will serve to remind the bride and groom not only of the promises they made to each other, but to God as well. A professional photographer can easily photograph a wedding while preserving the dignity and sanctity of the service."
Predictably, Miss Ultimate Wedding does not succumb to the argument that the price of the service demonstrates its importance, or that guests should understand that they have actually been invited to a filming. She has yet to hear of a marriage's being saved because God had photographic evidence of the vows, and hopes that the idea of an instant replay of a wedding for the camera, while the guests are left to fend for themselves, is a joke.
However, certain points made by the photographers have riveted her attention. First, that it is possible to make quality photographs from discreet positions, and without use of a flash. Second, that it is the bridal couple, not the photographer, who bears the responsibility.
As bridal couples are often not in the most judicious of states, Miss Ultimate Wedding is all the more glad that she appealed to the clergy to set the standards. It seems that many of them do. Rules include restricting photographs to the processional and recessional, banning flash cameras, allowing only one photographer, or requiring video cameras to remain stationary. Some make announcements at the beginning of the ceremony, or on wedding programs, but others feel that setting conditions for having the ceremony there, and repeating the rules at the wedding rehearsal, suffice. "If couples ask for more leeway than we can accommodate," writes one pastor, "they are reminded that they might direct their attention to the sacred moment rather than becoming preoccupied with memories to enjoy later."
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