This week (2/16): Stuff That Makes Me Bridal.
The bridal industry hates my guts. The feeling is mutual.
Here's the deal: My fiance and I don't want a lavish wedding. Nothing about huge, overblown (and expensive) spectacles has ever appealed to me. I sometimes think I have a stray Y chromosome floating around somewhere in my genetic makeup; when I read "Men Are From Mars; Women Are From Venus," I had more Martian characteristics (including an aversion to achingly cute terms used to oversimplify the differences between men and women) than otherwise. And while I've enjoyed some of the big weddings I've been to, I have utterly no desire to take the starring role in one. I try to picture myself floating down the aisle in my white gown, and see the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Woman wrapped in lace and taffeta with Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray running after me with ghostbusting weapons instead.
And I've lent an ear to enough frazzled brides to kill any remaining dreams I might have had of the big, showy pageant. Does it sound like fun to deal with bridesmaids who announce that they'll quit if the female wedding party doesn't wear hats and spike heels? A malicious ex-wife/mother-of-the-bride who commandeers the placecards at the reception and puts the current wife's family back by the bathrooms? Parents of the groom who yank their offer to contribute the floral arrangements a week before the wedding, after a fight with the parents of the bride? Brides-to-be having hissyfits because they aren't getting exactly what they wanted from their gift registry, and threatening that people who didn't send an appropriate gift don't get to eat at the reception? I've seen it all, and do I need this? Hell, no.
Even so, some long-dormant girly-girl instinct in me gave me the urge to go buy some "Brides"-type magazines. It just seemed like the Thing To Do, a bride-to-be's rite of passage. I figured that surely, somewhere in one of those telephone-book-sized doorstops, there might be buried some advice for a small, intimate, practical civil ceremony.
Ha. Ha ha ha. And ha again. "Useless" doesn't begin to describe these things. People like me don't have much to offer the bridal industry (no gigantic thousand-dollar poofy dress, no big reception hall, no bridal and ... uh ... groomal? party, no father of the bride being hauled off to debtor's prison), so my situation was not addressed in anything I read. In fact, it didn't seem like much of anything was addressed in these magazines besides a big old shitload of ads. I had to flip through about 40 pages of ads for dresses, rings, and honeymoon locations for every one article, and the articles didn't tell me too much I couldn't have guessed anyhow. In fact, the copy editor of "Washington Brides" seemed to bank on the notion that the engaged women reading it would be too swoony with romantic excitement to notice that the same article about impossible bridesmaids appeared twice, under different titles. (Why was I reading about impossible bridesmaids when I'm not having any, impossible or otherwise, at my wedding? Reassurance that no, I really didn't want a big ceremony.)
I'm also glad I don't want a huge, white, poofy gown, because if you are not tall, thin, and beautiful, judging from the ads, you ain't getting one. About 80 percent of the gowns pictured were the kind of long, extremely narrow column-type dresses that look good on about five percent of the female population. I found exactly one tiny ad section in the back that catered to full-figured women, and if the bridal gown size racket is anything like the bridesmaid's gown size racket I faced a few years ago at a family wedding, you'd better be a fairly well-off full-figured woman to afford one. The price for the bridesmaid's gowns my cousin picked out was based on a size two gown. Any larger size was considered an "alteration" that cost significantly more money. And the utterly, utterly shameless part of the racket is that the dress shops will insist that a Calista Flockhart's dress size is a number more suited to Camryn Manheim. (No kidding. A size four bridesmaid in our party was told she needed a size 12 gown. Shameless, I tell you.)
One of the bride magazines made a game attempt to spice things up a little with a Cosmo-girl style "Let's Talk About Sex" column, a "frank" Q&A. The honest answer to almost every question would have been "If you can bring yourself to share that with a national magazine but not with your own fiance, you shouldn't be getting married, you ninny." But the "expert" took the cute route. If your sexually inexperienced fiance can't figure out what turns you on, "Hit him with an omelet pan! (Kidding!)" Aw, and I was just on the way to the kitchen. A very bothered and bewildered bride-to-be complained that her fiance wanted to have sex "Every day! Sometimes twice!" The expert response? "Face it: You're just too hot for him to resist!" Ugh. The response got a bit more serious after that, but the cutesy tone lingered on like the odor of unwashed socks throughout the rest of the column, with talk of "Magnum men", "nookie nectar", and another "Just kidding!" or two. Oy.
So, after blowing money I really don't need to be spending freely on this rubbish, I've gotten over my girly-girl phase. Thank you, "Brides" magazine. You've helped to convince me that I never want to do things your way.