Manolo for the Brides

I’m the first one to say that marriage isn’t always about ZOMG PASSION. First kisses, those are about passion. Romantic weddings? Passion-o-rama. Post break-up youknowwhatsie? Whoa Nelly! But marriage…marriage is occasionally antipassion, a substance that has a lot in common with antimatter. But, hey, there’s gotta be some passion, because that little spark that makes you feel all googlywoogly in your stomach when you look at your mate should never die out completely.

Unless, that is, you are one Lori Gottlieb, a woman who has apparently made a career out of airing her complexities (read: issues) in the public eye. In a recent article entitled Marry Him! she asserts that every single woman everywhere, no matter how satisfied, no matter how independent, wants a man, any man, as in “oh please for the love of God send a man so I can get married because there is no greater fulfillment for a woman!”

My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go.

To Gottlieb, marriage and by extension men (there’s no mention of what lesbians want) are nothing more than a means to an end. If you want security and a permanent live-in partner, then you need to start looking past his lack of wit, his lack of culture, and his lack of personality so you can start looking at what he does have, namely a pulse and a job.

I’m actually pro-settling to a certain extent. One line in the article, “I would say even if he’s not the love of your life, make sure he’s someone you respect intellectually, makes you laugh, appreciates you … I bet there are plenty of these men in the older, overweight, and bald category” really resonated with me. I happen to believe that there are tons of great guys who fall into the doesn’t-have-cool-hair-laughs-at-inappropriate-times-a-little-pudgy-can’t-dance-worth-a-damn category.

The point, however, is not that you settle for these rare and wonderful creatures. Rather, it’s that you give them a chance, find out that in addition to playing a mean game of WoW they’re secret sex machines, and then thank the Lord that some other lucky lady didn’t snap them up first. You don’t say, oh, ho hum, I’m just shy of forty so I better snare the first set of XY chromosomes who happens along so I don’t turn into a lonely old hag.

Unless, like I said, you’re Lori Gottlieb, in which case you’re probably going to spend your life sighing over romantic comedies while a husband who bores the crap out of you is off puttering around his workshop. Or not. As a friend of mine put it, “What, exactly, is she bringing to the table? Naked desperation and a ton of to-be-delegated responsibility? I, for one, am SHOCKED she hasn’t found a guy willing to “settle” for that.”

Heh.

I know, I know, the actual slogan is ‘WE go bridal’, but I think mine is more appropriate.

Tomorrow, WE TV kicks off a week of intense bridal programming to program us all for Valentine’s Day, when successful girls get diamond rings and live happily ever after…once they finish with all the stress and insanity of plotting…er…planning a wedding, which cannot be done without the help of a wedding planner and now a boot camp instructor.

Yes, a new and yet more degrading show has been added to the lineup by the folks that brought you such gems as Bridezillas, that ode to bridal misbehavior, and Rich Bride, Poor Bride which seems to mainly be about how it’s impossible to stick to a wedding budget and why your marriage will always be improved by spending twice what you thought you were going to on the wedding. This one is the revoltingly-titled ‘Bulging Brides.’

Yes, at long last we have a show dedicated to informing brides to be that their lives will be ruined if they don’t lose those extra five or ten pounds before they march down the aisle in their cookie-cutter-inspired strapless gowns. From the previews I’ve seen, most of the women featured are not heavy by any stretch of the imagination…they just either bought their gowns a bit too small or managed to gain a couple pounds since they bought. Eek. How horrible!

Don’t worry, though! Help is on the way! Trainer Tommy Europe and nutritionist Nadeen Bowman are ready to publicly humiliate you and whip you into shape. I’ve asked this before, but why oh why do women sign up for these shows? What are they getting that’s a worthy recompense for their dignity?

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Ever since Polka Dot Bride won the first ever Wedding Blog Awards, um, award, I’ve been keeping an eye on the site. Every now and again a certain Abby chooses a new blog or photog to highlight in categories like “Best New Wedding Blog” and “Best Use of Photos.” Long story short, the site has introduced me to some fab blogs.

Now it seems that we’re this month’s “Most Dedicated” blog! Go us! I’ll tell you, though, it’s easy to be dedicated when you absolutely, positively love what you’re doing. I mean, I’m humble…but I’m not that humble. For example I’m not so humble that I won’t use this webbish award as an opportunity to suggest that you ready yourself for the eventual release of iDo, which can now be pre-ordered on Amazon and elsewhere!

In my most humble opinion, there are far too many bridal books out there that push the “princess for a day” message. La la la, it’s your day, don’t worry about your budget, your loved ones, or something as silly as, say, the weather. Oh, and if you don’t feel a sense of perfect bliss as you tie the knot, you’ve obviously done something very wrong.

Um, yuck? If you know a bride-to-be who’s just a little sick of all the hype, do her a favor and present her one of the books below the next time she shows up on your doorstep because she needs to rant about how she feels alienated by the ubergirly bridal guides her FMIL gave her for her birthday.

Or maybe you’re a bride-to-be who needs a little help going green or wants to hear from an expert that, yes, it’s okay to buck tradition. After all, getting hitched is a rite of passage…not an all-purpose excuse to toss common sense out the window or go megashopping.

Of course, if you don’t fancy any of the books above, you’ll just have to wait until June when my book comes out!

I officially finished the first draft of my book last night–it was technically already done as of this past Sunday, but then I was reading it over, which meant there was a lot of, “Oh my gosh, what was I thinking using that word” and “This sentence has just got to go.” It has been a looooong two months, but there have been some nice little surprises to lessen the load.

Last week, I was lucky enough to receive some samples from Placetile Designs, which brightened my day considerably as my mail usually consists of nothing but mortgage insurance adverts and coupon booklets. I received some of these:

And one of these:

Company founder Kristin Bowen came up with the wonderfully clever idea of using erasable ceramic tiles as place cards and favors at her own wedding in 1999, and her guests loved them. The concept evolved to include all sorts of neat things, like wine cork place card tiles, menu tiles, napkin ring tiles, table number tiles, tiles for identifying foodstuffs, and a bunch of other lovely stuff you can write on with dry erase markers. So far, the wine stoppers are at the top of my potential book release party favors list.

For bigger, complicated receptions where there will be lots of attendees who don’t know one another, place cards (or at the very least, table numbers) are a must. I’ve always personally preferred place cards that double as favors or are integrated into favors because I like when everything in a tablescape has a definitive purpose. I’m envisioning a table with a erasable table number tile and wine stoppers or tags printed with guests names. If the bride and groom send the table number tile home with a guest, it automatically becomes a to-do list tile. Such is the beauty of being able to erase and rewrite.

On the off chance that the stuff from Placetile Designs is a little out of your price range, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. You can decorate your own erasable tile place cards and table numbers using the instructions here. Be aware, however, that you need to find tile that works like a dry erase board because some tile will hold onto the marker permanently. Check to be sure that what goes on can indeed come off before you buy bulk tiles, then go nuts with the paints!

Every now and again, I get a book to review. It’s one of the perks of this gig–no one is sending me free designer wedding dresses to review, so I have to content myself with books about weddings. Sometimes those books are fiction, which is great because I love a good story. Once in a great blue while, I’m actually surprised by what I get.

So what was so surprising about Janice Thompson’s Gone With the Groom? It’s a Christian wedding mystery. Somewhere along the PR line, I either failed to notice that the book is from a Christian imprint (Barbour Publishing) or the public relations jockeys failed to tell me. Not that it matters much to me whether a book is Christian, Islamic, or pro-FSM–I’ll read just about anything.

If you like a really lighthearted mystery novel with lots of references to the big G, you’ll probably get a kick out of this book. If, however, you’d prefer something a little darker and more realistic, I’d advise you to look elsewhere. This book has got plenty of sugar and you may just get a cavity if you’re not used to the brand of storytelling where everyone loves each other and proclaims it loudly and proudly, all the flippin’ time.

The big problem with the story is that it’s convoluted. The titular groom disappears two weeks before the wedding, and no one who knows him can believe that it’s just cold feet. Enter Annie, MOB and crack amateur detective…for some reason, everyone in town spills their guts when she comes a’callin with her notepad. She has her theories about who’s to blame for the groom’s absence: the big pharma company, the groom’s own deadbeat dad, the shifty local photog, and the MOG’s “political enemies.”

Why the scare quotes? Well, I’m hard pressed to believe that a local paper from one of Atlanta, GA’s suburbs is going to send a reporter all the way up to the snowy north to tail a woman running for town council. I’ve been a local paper reporter…they won’t even give us overtime to cover the city council elections, much less chase candidates up and down the coast.

It’s pretty obvious from the start who the culprit is…just look for the most stereotypically suspicious character and you can’t help but guess right. You’ll have to suspend your disbelief with a system of complex pulleys if you intended to sit down and enjoy this book. I’ll state for the record that I’m no big mystery fan, but I’m plenty able to identify the plot holes a’plenty in Gone With the Groom. I won’t say don’t buy it–it’s a fun little story. It just could have been a lot better.

Today is my birthday, and this is how I feel inside:

I’ve known brides who could just as easily have said, “Today is my wedding day, and this is how I feel inside.” Not because they didn’t want to get married, but because their weddings did not unfold as expected.

Ready for a personal, off-topic (i.e. NWR) post? Good…so am I. Right now, I’m under contract to write a book…a book about weddings, natch. There are lots and lots of reasons that the book probably wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t started writing for The Manolo. One of the reasons–I’m convinced–that the publisher was so open to taking my book on was the fact that I could say that I had a readership.

So even though I’m feeling kind of blah and I can’t just stop what I’m doing to pamper myself and play, I wanted to give ya’ll a big dose of my gratitude because you’re part of the reason I’ve had so many good things happen to me this past year! And somewhere in all that gratitude is a big hug of thanks for The Manolo as well! This is me inviting everyone to join me in dressing up and putting on the nearest tiara (something I do every year on my natal anniversary) so we can all be extra fabulous and super fantastic the whole day through. Nothing, I think, lifts the birthday blahs like a good tiara.

And maybe a good laugh…under the cut, you’ll find a funny video–funny because it’s so true–that I pulled from Stupid Wedding Crap. If you’re at work, be aware that there is a bit of profanity.

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As I said yesterday, I’ve spent an entire week watching every wedding-related reality show I could pick up on my cable package. It’s been grueling. I never realized how many shows there are on TV about wedding planning, or how little useful information can be gleaned from most of them.

I did, however, pick up on some interesting social messages these shows are trying to sell us on, many of which I found outright bizarre as well as unhelpful. Here’s what I kept seeing on show after show:

1: Budgets are made to be broken, and anyone who tries to keep one intact is the villian of the piece. Again and again I saw fathers, grooms, and even the occasional bride called cheap or gazed upon more in pity than in anger because they felt it was unreasonable to blow the budget by the equivilant of the Gross National Product of Brazil. I saw wedding planners work with brides and their mothers to ‘hide’ expenses from daddy so he wouldn’t blow his top - expenses like a second multi-thousand dollar reception dress because the multi-thousand wedding gown was too much to boogie in all night long. I heard a bride chastised for thinking since the flowers didn’t mean that much to her she’d rather get them from a grocery store than a professional florist, even if she could get more flowers for a hundred dollars less and was at least as happy with the result.

2: Wedding planners are wonderful even when they don’t do their jobs well. Some of the planners I watched did a really fabulous job. A couple even attempted to keep the budget from completely skyrocketing completely out of control. One amazing one even got a couple pretty much everything they wanted for two thousand dollars less than their stated budget, and said budget was well under $20,000 to begin with. On the other hand, there was no negative commentary on the wedding planner who allowed an $8,000 backyard wedding to bloat into a $30,000 backyard wedding even with the bride managing to borrow a lot of plants and decorations. This is also the planner who envisioned a dramatic, billowy fabric curtain to define the wedding/reception areas of the yard and allow the bride a dramatic entrance…only to discover the night before the wedding that she needed another fifty yards of fabric to make it happen.

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I picked up The Dressmaker by Elizabeth Birkelund Oberbeck hoping for lighthearted story with a happy ending, but ended up drowning in a cautionary tale of the true cost of creative genius. Or something like that anyway. I will not tease you into reading this novel by saying that it had a happy ending because when it comes down to it, there is very little happiness to be had in the whole of the book. The characters that populate its pages are living dream lives they cannot appreciate. Deep in their hearts they know they want something else, but they are at a loss to understand just what that something else is.

Middle-aged tailor Claude Reynaud is a man wholly unable to derive any pleasure from his successes. Women who move in the most influential circles flock to his Reynaud for the privilege of serving as his living canvases at upper crust soirées, weddings, and other grand events. (more…)