When you’re getting married, there’s one thing there’s no shortage of: advice.
From magazines and TV shows to old friends to business associates to random strangers in the street, everyone’s got an opinion on the right and wrong way to do things. And the sight of an engagement ring or that Google search you did on local venues is enough to make most of them think you want to hear their opinion.
You’ll find a lot of chaff among the wheat. I have known people who were advised to avoid things that mattered to them or have things they can’t stand. I was personally advised that my marriage would be doomed if it wasn’t performed by a clergyperson… never mind that I was an atheist and Mr. Twistie was more of a teetering agnostic. Nineteen years later, we still don’t believe in or follow any organized religion and spend little time worrying about an afterlife. Also? We’re still very much happily married. My feeling is that shared beliefs, or at minimum a strong understanding of and respect for differing beliefs is a lot more important than what the specific beliefs are.
I was also advised variously to have a cash bar (I don’t charge my friends for drinks at my party), ignore the needs of known vegetarians coming to my wedding (which, as it happens, included the Matron of Honor and her husband), make Mr. Twistie have a wedding ring and force him to wear it to prove he’s married, and to hire a DJ to play out in the woods with no electricity source because it’s less hassle than a live band.
Yeah, those things were not happening.
But among all that chaff, there really was some wheat to be found, too.
The three best pieces of advice I got were:
1) Keep your sense of humor handy.
2) Something will go wrong, but it’s only a disaster if you let it be one.
3) Remember that there will be other, better days in the future.
What about all of you? Have you gotten a particularly ghastly piece of advice? One that might be good if you were having a very different wedding? One that was truly helpful?
Tell me all about it!
Oh, man, shortly after we announced our engagement an acquaintance found my number, called me up, and spent 20 minutes AT LEAST tossing out all sorts of random ideas and advice about what we should do at our wedding. But the kicker was this gem she ended with “But the most important thing, and I wish someone had told me this for my wedding, is to never let anyone tell you how to do things because it’s YOUR day.”
The irony was totally lost on her.
I got a couple of good pieces of advice. One was, “Everybody looks to the bride. If the bride is relaxed and happy and goes with the flow, then everybody else will have a good time. If the bride is tense, then everybody else will be on edge.” The other was given by a fellow Type-A personality, Bossy-Broad friend, “The day of the wedding is too late to fix any problems. So let them go. As long as it isn’t anything catastrophic, then let it go.”
Those are excellent pieces of advice, Ripley. They’re also both borne out by my personal experiences with brides both calm and crazed.