I recently read this assertion in a People.com piece about Kate Middleton quitting her job at her parents’ party supply company:
“As every bride knows, with just a few months to go before the big day, planning a wedding practically becomes a full-time job.”
Does that strike anyone else as a little insulting? Or at least patronizing? Absolutely, planning a wedding takes a lot of time. And unfortunately, for a lot of brides-to-be, that time is tallied in weekend hours and lunch hours and evening hours. But if it’s taking you eight hours a day, five days a week, I really hope you are getting paid to plan someone else’s lavish, multi-day reception, not your own ceremony and reception.
I know that planning a wedding can feel like a full-time job, especially on those days when you need to call up or email multiple vendors and make final decisions regarding fabric colors and so on, but planning a wedding is also a waiting game. There is A LOT of downtime involved in planning a wedding, and I sincerely hope that People hasn’t given otherwise calm brides-to-be a reason to stress by implying that they’re not doing enough if they’re not devoting hours and hours to the wedding.
We probably need to give Kate a break here. She is planning the most-talked about and likely to be the most photographed wedding of the year, if not decade. I can’t imagine what it must be like planning a royal wedding – I would probably need to quit my job too! Then again, who needs a job when you’re about to become a princess?
What she should have said: “As every princess-to-be knows, with just a few months to go before the big day, planning a royal wedding literally becomes a full-time job.â€
…There, that’s better!
Wish I could have quit my job to stay at home and plan our wedding. Some of us have to work to pay for the wedding they are planning for. The stress is what helps make that big day so special.
I actually did quit my job before my wedding… about a week before my wedding and moving a hundred miles away from said job. It was mostly so I could plan and pack up for the move without losing my tenuous grasp on reality. The wedding was well under control.
My guess is that Kate isn’t really the one person doing most of the planning for this wedding, anyway. There are so many layers of protocol and potential repercussions in international relations with the wedding of a close heir to the throne for many of the decisions to be made by the people who are actually the ones getting married. But since it is highly unlikely that Kate would continue to hold down any job once she’s married into the royal family, it was probably considered more seemly that she quit now and get used to her new job as a royal.
Phooey on People for trying to sell this as a necessary step for all brides planning weddings of any size! I know it was probably meant as a tongue-in-cheek comment on how weddings just eat up our tiny feminine brains, tee hee, but the trope just isn’t that funny.