In short, even a lot of people who admired the commitment these couples made to living lightly on Mother Earth wouldn’t be caught dead in a ditch looking – or smelling – like them.

But times have changed. You don’t have to be a card-carrying hippie to care about the environment anymore. and you don’t have to completely reject both tradition and fashion to follow your convictions.


To start with, think about decorations that are consumable. For instance, the centerpiece on this reception table not only looks gorgeous, but feeds your guests at the same time. Bowls of fresh fruit, small platters of appetizers, pretty jugs or pitchers of beverages, candies, or even an attractive cake for the table’s dessert… any of these things will look fabulous, taste great, and save on your budget for fresh flowers and non-organic decorations.

Alternately, consider putting live plants in pretty pots on the tables for decoration.

Really consider how many paper goods you need… and forget about the rest.

Yes, you’ll need invitations and RSVP cards. You’ll need thank you cards of some sort. But think hard about whether you really need ceremony programs. Decide whether you would rather have your guests decide their own seating, eliminating the need for place cards. As for menus, doing without entirely, making only one per table to be shared, or setting up an attractive chalk board for the whole room are all viable alternatives to one at each place at each table.

Oh, and never forget that you can find invitations and all the rest printed on recycled paper.

Second hand doesn’t have to be second best. Maybe someone close to you has the most gorgeous wedding gown just hanging in her closet. Maybe you find a fabulous veil in a consignment shop. Perhaps your aunt has some serving pieces she’s ready to let go. You might even find the perfect ring pillow in a garage sale. Why let these wonderful things go to waste? Give them a home and a second chance.

Remember to check for natural fibers. Cotton, linen, silk, and wool are natural fibers. Rayon is a synthetic fiber made of natural materials. Nylon, polyester, acetate, and so on are not natural fibers by any definition. If you’re going green, synthetic fibers are not what you’re looking for… though if they’re being re-used I won’t tell anyone!

If you have leftovers left over, try to find a green way of disposing of them. In some cases, you may be able to donate leftover food to a local soup kitchen or homeless shelter. If your meal won’t meet the legal requirements, then set out Chinese takeout boxes and invite your guests to take some food home with them. Mr. Twistie and I did this one (though I wish I had thought of the boxes at the time!), and it was a big hit. In fact, we’d seriously overbought food for fear of people leaving hungry, and a couple of our friends lived on leftovers from our wedding for days afterwards.

Keep it real, my friends… but feel free to forget about patchouli and incense. Unless that’s your bag, man.

When sportswriter Pete Iorizzo recently married, several guests generously gave him and his bride checks as gifts. Ca-ching! Great news! While cold, hard cash is not the most romantic gift possible, it’s certainly a useful one.

Unfortunately, there was a catch when the bride headed down to Bank of America to deposit said checks in their joint checking account: the bank refused to accept the checks.

You see the checks were written to ‘Mr. and Mrs. Peter Iorizzo’ and the lady had chosen not to change her last name. The teller insisted that since she hadn’t changed her name there was no such person as Mrs. Peter Iorizzo, and so no check could be deposited with that name on it. The lady offered to produce her marriage license, but still the bank would have none of it. Discussion with higher ups at the bank offered no solution.

The next day Mr. Iorizzo went to the bank with the same results. Even when he pointed out this couldn’t be the first time the situation had been seen (some ten per cent of brides nationwide do not take their new spouse’s last name, and yet more choose to hyphenate), the manager of the branch insisted this was the first time in twenty years he’d seen such a thing.

I don’t know about you, but I know plenty of women who didn’t take their husband’s names. Yes, the rate is higher than average in California, and I do happen to live in probably the most liberal area of the state… but there are women in Utah and Montana and literally every state in the union who make the same choice I did to keep their own names. And even if a woman does choose to change her name, as most do, it’s mighty rare that the paperwork would all be done and new ID issued at the time a couple is depositing their wedding gift checks. How can this manager never have seen a new bride whose ID doesn’t match the checks before?

When Mr. Twistie and I were married nearly twenty years ago, we got a couple checks written to Mr. and Mrs. His Name His Name. We didn’t even have a joint account until we’d been married some three or four years, but we managed to get those checks dealt with sans any huge fuss. Mr. Twistie endorsed them, signed them ‘for deposit only’, explained to the teller that he’d just gotten married… and voila! Money in the account.

In the end, though, the happy couple did manage to work out their problem with Bank of America… by depositing their checks at a different branch, where they were faced with no hassle, no confusion, no problem. Oh, and where the teller congratulated them on their marriage.

The lesson learned here: some banks are dinosaurs. Find out whether yours is before you deposit any wedding checks. Oh, and if possible, spread the word on how the bride intends to style herself after the marriage… before people write you checks.

What’s the big deal about her wedding dress? Well, they’ve created a website devoted to it and the many places throughout the world where they’ve had it photographed.

State parks, New Zealand, the Vatican, even a 76ers game:
Jennifer and her wedding dress have travelled the globe. Why? Well, according to the website, One Dress, One Woman, One World:

In a sea of changing places, people, scenery and seasons, the bride eternal and her flowing gown have spanned the globe, bringing out the adventurer, the romantic, the model, the artist, and the dreamer in all of us. Within these pages, you have seen one dress, one woman, one world, and a lifetime of endless possibilities and adventures still to be had.

Okay, I’m down with being happy with your wedding gown. I’m down with traveling the world. I’m down with dreaming of endless possibilities.

I guess I just kind of wonder why she can’t dream in other outfits.

Opinions?

Not too long ago, the gorgeous Twistie posed this compelling question: What if you don’t care? As in, what if you don’t care about wedding cake or finding the perfect wedding dress or reception table centerpieces or having real linens? Of course the answer is that your wedding will not be ruined just because you don’t spend ages hunting for a dress or you have paper napkins at the post-ceremony brunch buffet. My advice is always going to be “If you don’t care about it, don’t do it/don’t stress over it/let someone else handle it.” It’s pretty good advice, if I do say so myself!

The only problem? Every so often a bride comes out on the far side of her wedding and discovers that she does care or ought to have cared about certain details. There are definitely things I thought I didn’t care about while planning a wedding that I can now say I wish I had cared about because they are the things that cause those tiny pangs of regret I sometimes feel when looking at my wedding photo album. And I would love to hear, from those of you already married, what you wish you’d cared MORE about while planning a wedding. Maybe you didn’t put much thought into your bouquet and it stands out as an afterthought in your pics. Or your wedding cake was only so-so but you wish it had been fabulous. Could be you are sorry you didn’t devote more of your budget to your wedding photography or your wedding rings.

In the absence of a time machine, there’s not a lot we married ladies can do about it now… other than to suggest that brides-to-be and grooms-to-be take our stories into consideration when planning their weddings. It sounds and feels a bit silly, but it makes a lot of sense to create a list of things you and your intended don’t care about and then to meditate on it for a bit. Try to imagine your future wedding photos – do the things you think you don’t care about make an appearance after all? You may be surprised to discover that a few things on that ‘don’t care list’ suddenly feel more important! Or you may find that you really don’t care and can safely devote yourself to the things that are actually important to you. Either way, you have just upped your chances of having the wedding you really want.

How many times have bridesmaids been told precisely that as they cringe internally? I was told it about a dusty rose acetate taffeta (with matching polyester lace, no less!) high-necked, long-sleeved, full-skirted, tea length number once.

At least it was cheap. It never saw the light of day again. Then again, nothing in dusty rose ever would from my closet. It’s one of the few colors in the world that I detest and I look as though I’m in the final stages of terminal jaundice in it. I did, however, have better luck with the next two bridesmaids dresses I wore.

This week on Project Runway, Season 8, a group of women who were all told The Lie showed up to have their unfortunate polyester and acetate monstrosities turned into clothes they actually would want to wear again (but wouldn’t be able to after the runway show, because all designs on the show become the property of the show and are auctioned off at the end of the season).

This is what the designers started with:
via

Just look at that parade of fugly.

Anyway, there’s a pile of backstage drama. Judges fall in love with and hate on the conversions following the tortured labyrinths of their own minds. My beloved Peach was sent (deservedly, alas!) home for creating something Michael Kors declared to feature ‘avocado goiters.’ And Michael Costello won a second time with a look that left me scratching my head.

At least they didn’t all look like they did when they started out!

If you want more backstage drama or just pics of what the designers did to all of these awful dresses, take a peek over at Lifetime.

And if you watched the episode and have any thoughts on it (including the Ivy vs Michael C. controversy) feel free to dish in comments. Just keep in mind that no matter what you think of anyone or anything else on that show, Tim Gunn is totally my imaginary gay celebrity boyfriend and anyone who hates on him will earn my eternal wrath.

Over the last seventeen years we’ve coped with feast and famine – and more famine than feast. We’ve dealt with illness, injury, and death. We’ve made good decisions and bad ones, laughed and cried, agreed and disagreed.

And do you know what? I would absolutely do it all again.

Sometimes happily ever after does sort of happen.

I just thought you might like to know that.

The fact is, however, that divorce is how a heck of a lot of marriages end. The common wisdom is that half of all marriages end in divorce. The good news, according to this article at The Daily Beast, is that the statistic is now closer to a 40% chance of divorce.

The article goes on to note fifteen things that can make a divorce more likely in your relationship. Some are not terribly surprising, such as how often you argue about money or if one of you smokes and the other doesn’t. Some are more surprising, such as whether you have a son or a daughter (parents of boys are less likely to break up, it seems).

There’s even a link to the handy, dandy Divorce 360 Marriage Calculator which allows you to check the statistical likelihood of your getting divorced. Of course it doesn’t include information from both partners, and the information for the person filling out the form is pretty darn generalized, but still, there it is.

According to the Marriage Calculator, a woman of my educational level who married around the same time I did and at a similar age has roughly a 28% chance of having divorced. That leaves me with a 72% chance of still being married. I’m statistically solid, as it turns out.

But there’s a lot more to life and marriage than statistics. Let me tell you about my paternal grandparents.

On paper, they were the poster children for an early, acrimonious divorce. She was tall, he was short. It was a May/December romance. In fact, my grandfather was a year older than his mother-in-law! Granny lived with her parents in pretty much one place before she married, Mac had emigrated from Canada at a very early age and traveled all over the US and beyond. My grandfather was a gourmand, Granny was a lousy cook. He had a chaotic sense of humor and adored the Marx Brothers and WC Fields. She had no sense of humor. He was a dapper flirt. She felt that clothes were God’s way of telling us to cover up and behave ourselves. She graduated high school and went on to teaching college, eventually becoming a teacher herself. He was a self-taught man with no degrees. He loved to read history books, technical manuals on engineering, Mark Twain, and especially Zane Grey. The only things my grandmother read were the Bible and Agatha Christie mysteries. By every possible statistic, these two should have been on their way to divorce court before they got back from the Honeymoon.

And yet, they delighted in one another for forty-some years. One night my grandfather went to sleep and just didn’t wake up again. He was 94 and still in love with Granny.

But the fact is that while it’s fun and easy to talk about flowers and dresses and menus and jewelry, there’s an entire marriage after the wedding, and we do think it’s important to consider that marriage.

If you’re old enough to even be thinking about getting married, chances are you’ve learned somewhere along the line that compromise is important. If you haven’t learned it by the time you start planning, chances are you’ll have a better understanding of the concept at the end of the process. No matter what your budget or how mellow all the players involved happen to be, a wedding will entail some compromises in some area.

But what about your happily ever after?

Marriage entails a lot of compromise on a daily basis. What to eat and who cooks it, which movie to see, whether to save first for his big priority or yours, who takes out the garbage vs who scrubs the bathroom…you’re going to wind up making deals about a lot of things.

Some of these choices are easy. I do the cooking, because Mr. Twistie only knows two settings on the burners: high and off. Also, I’m home when it’s time to start cooking far more consistently and I love to cook. I also do the dishes because I actually like that part. Call me freaky, but I do. Mr. Twistie may think that bit was a compromise, but really it was a matter of personal preference as much as self-preservation.

Some are harder. I moved to a new city. I’d lived in my hometown literally as long as I could remember. I’d lived in the same house since I was two years old, and I got married at thirty. Yeah, I tend to stay where I’m put. By contrast, Mr. Twistie had only lived in his hometown since he was nine, and could remember living in two other cities. So why was I the one to move?

We each had one older parent living at the time, but while my father was active and had a nice nest egg to live on and lots of close friends right at hand, my mother in law had a smaller social circle, little cash, worse health, and a language barrier (she was originally from Japan and had developed her own personal English slang that virtually nobody but Mr. Twistie actually understood). Mr. Twistie had a band, and all the players lived in his city. Me? I had a nice job at a local bookstore, friends with cars, and a healthy respect for all the time that Mr. Twistie had been spending on the road coming to get me or taking me home during the time we’d lived more than an hour apart. I figured I could get another nice job in another nice bookstore (which I did pretty quickly). It was a wrench, but I was more than willing to make the choice.

On the other hand, I didn’t give up my name. That was important to me. Mr. Twistie didn’t care whether I changed my name so long as I changed my address. I wasn’t willing to give up my cat. Mr. Twistie – who hadn’t lived with a pet since his dog died almost twenty years before – had to learn how to live with a cat. Love me, love my cat, and there’s no way I’m changing that.

Over the years, we’ve made thousands of compromises, large and small. Which comes first? Getting me a decent stove, or doing a pressing of his latest album? We hash it out. One of us wants to eat Mexican and the other Italian. We hash it out. We compromise. Sometimes one gets the win, sometimes the other. The important thing is that when it matters, we sit down and talk like adults until we have a decision that both of us are contented to accept.

People talk all the time about how hard it can be to plan a wedding, and it can be, depending on your vision vs your resources vs the expectations of others who believe (rightly or wrongly) that they have a say in the matter. Compared to marriage, though, weddings are easy. You know that when a certain date is past, it’s over and there’s nothing you can do to change it. Marriage is open-ended. It’s vision vs resources vs expectation every single day. Then you get up the next morning and start all over again.

Of course, there are rewards to marriage that cannot be overstated, and some that can’t even be quantified. If it were nothing but an endless miserable slog, it wouldn’t be worth doing at all. If that’s where your marriage is, then it’s time to see if something can be done to change it. If change cannot be worked out, then it’s time to stop making yourselves miserable and go your separate ways.

Every once in a while, though, it’s good to take a look at where you are and remind yourself of what you will and won’t give up.

Me? I’m never giving up Mr. Twistie. Why? Because I firmly believe that thirty years of compromises from now, we’ll look just like this:

One interesting PR pitch I received a long while back comes from AreYouRomantic.com. Caesars Pocono Resorts commissioned the site’s creators to conduct a survey all about, you guessed it, honeymoons. Specifically how brides and grooms approach the honeymoon. Basically, AreYouRomantic.com found that more couples are paying for the honeymoon themselves, yet they still want to incorporate tradition into their weddings. Boooooring!

What got my attention, though, was the part of the survey dealing with the wedding night. The poll found that almost 20 percent of newly married couples don’t actually consummate their marriage on their wedding night. Frankly, I’m not surprised. Indeed I am more surprised that 80 percent actually do! I’ll just come right out with the TMI and say that The Beard and I were way too tired to do anything other than fall asleep since my mom hosted an after-the-wedding dinner at a nearby restaurant and we made the mistake of attending. Then I think we went swimming in the hotel pool with a bunch of our friends. When we got upstairs, consummation was just about the last thing on our minds.

And we’re not alone. Of the 20 percent who didn’t do the deed on the wedding night, 32 percent said that they (or their partner) were too tired. Another 14 percent said that they (or their partner) had too much to drink. Apparently women chose this answer more than men, but I’m not sure if they meant they drank too much or their partner drank too much. Roughly 11 percent said that family and friends were still around. More men chose that option. Finally, 10 percent said that it wasn’t important to them.

In the interest of finding out if the AreYouRomantic.com people got it right, I thought I’d conduct my own poll right here on Manolo for the Brides. Brides-to-be and former brides (as well as their grooms) are welcome to answer. If you’re married and open to sharing, tell us what you did or didn’t do. And if you’re going to be married soon, tell us what you plan to do or think you’ll do. Feel free to elaborate — though, please, not too much! — in the comments.

I won’t argue that it’s a bride’s right to seek compensation when a vendor contract is breached. Glatt asked for one thing and received another. But I can’t help but ask what she’ll remember when she looks back on her wedding day, say, twenty years from now. Will it be the gorgeous kiss she shared with her spouse at the climax of her wedding ceremony? Perhaps the delicious cake that was served at the reception? Or will Glatt look back and find that what comes to mind is both feelings of anger and visions of spending time in court?

There is, as both Twistie and I have asserted on many occasions, no such thing as a truly perfect wedding. Then again, maybe there is. If you can look back on your wedding day and remember all the good things that happened while putting all the annoyances out of your thoughts, then that sounds pretty perfect to me. Yes, the cat walked on your train with his little muddy paws while you were posing for photographs. And your FIL got a little too drunk and broke his wrist trying to breakdance at the reception. But you got married. Successfully, I might add. What some brides and grooms call catastrophes can even make for some funny anecdotes years later.

Yes, I lied a little in the title of this post — there are indeed ways a wedding can be truly ruined. Wedding guests and participants can get sick or even die. Natural disasters or man-made disasters can interfere. The bride or groom not showing up certainly applies. But I know from personal experience that many of the disappointments or situations that have the potential to ruin a wedding only actually do so when the bride or the groom can’t let go of them after the fact. Instead of recalling the ninety-nine good things that happened, they remember the one bad thing, and it colors their remembrances forevermore.

If one of those circumstances mentioned at the start of the previous paragraph happen to you, I give you full license to call your wedding ruined. But if it’s something else, like your wedding gown not shipping forcing you to choose an alternate dress or a misspelling of your new name on your last-minute programs, I’d ask you to think carefully before making such a pronouncement. Did you get married? Did your guests congratulate you on a beautiful ceremony? Did you dance and kiss and smile at the reception? Was the champagne delicious? Were the bouquets beautiful?

I bet the answer to those and most similar questions would be a resounding yes. So seek out financial compensation if you really need to because a contract hasn’t been fulfilled, but please, please don’t let one detail ruin your wedding in your mind. As goofy as it sounds, you have the power to have that so-called perfect wedding, but only if you allow yourself to think of it as perfect, flaws and all.