4: Our Wedding Planning Book

In which we somehow end up at Kafka…

I am not naturally good at asking for or accepting help. Even asking Lina to walk the dog (a responsibility I have rather arbitrarily decided is “mine”) takes more courage than it ought to. Some of this is about my inability to cede control, while some of it, I suspect, is about the image I project onto the world. We have a good friend Lina once described as having “the energy of someone who was born knowing how to change a tire.” That is an energy I aspire to, though I think the energy I likely give is more, “will watch one YouTube video and try to change a tire, unsuccessfully. Will then watch two more videos and do it right.” I wish I was born knowing things. I wasn’t. Sometimes this injustice is hard to accept.

Lina and I decided we did not want to hire a wedding planner ($$$), but we did want to buy a wedding planning book. We went to our local (Storied! Vaunted! Of which I am a proud paying member!) independent book store first, but they did not carry a single guide on how to plan a wedding. They did have one book on how to get divorced, next to another on how best to avoid sociopaths. (Lina asked, “But then what about the sociopaths?”) So, instead, like sociopaths, we drove to the Barnes and Noble at the Glendale Americana.

I’m not sure what I was expecting to find, but I will say I was simultaneously delighted, dismayed, horrified, and exhausted by our options. Across from the biographies of sports legends and just above manuals on gardening by the season, there was one shelf dedicated to wedding planning. You can spot it from the escalators, the spines all lavender, mint, and bubblegum pink. I asked Lina what she thought we should be looking for specifically, and she said she just wanted something very practical, without too much personality. Any book that seemed like it might wear cowboy boots with a denim skirt while yelling “Ya, bitch! Let’s plan your wedding!” was probably not for us. It would be great if it was a book we could take out to a coffee shop or a bar and not feel too embarrassed to be seen holding. One should never judge a book by its cover, yet it is only human nature to judge the person carrying that book cover.

Some of the books we pulled from the shelf included “We’re Getting F*cking Married!” (which, for SEO purposes, seems to be officially titled “Make Wedding Planning a Piece of Cake”), “The Budget-Savvy Wedding Planner & Organizer,” and planners specifically for bridesmaids and mothers-of-the-bride. Every book was covered in illustrations of flowers or ribbons. Weddings in the 2020s have a look — these books both show and tell you what that look is.

There are plenty of other niche options online, like this book on how to insert Pagan magic into your wedding, which is sick as hell, or a two e-book set that combines a wedding planning manual with a Keto diet plan. But that afternoon we were in the zone and wanted to buy something in person. We sat on the floor flipping through our options. There were a lot of checklists, and several page-long worksheets to help draw out your vision. I found it both overwhelming and underwhelming, like trying to choose a spaghetti sauce, or toothpaste.

Where we landed was a small book by Terri Pous, called “How to Plan a Wedding: A Month-by-Month Guide for Modern Weddings.” It makes some sense that we gravitated towards this book: Pous is the executive editor at Apartment Therapy (dot com), a former writer and editor at Buzzfeed, and a two-time Jeopardy champion. Her writing is clear and useful, and avoids the pedantic tone of so much wedding material (what I have taken to calling “wedding voice”). The book is divided into twelve small sections, guiding you through what you ought to be thinking about and deciding in the year leading up to your wedding. There are questions like:

• What weddings have you been to that you really liked? What did you like about them?

• What weddings have you been to that felt… off? Why?

• What traditions do you want to include? Think beyond the cake and dress… What family traditions that you hold dear would you feel sad not including?

• What traditions are not important to you?

Each question has a few blank lines for notes below it. It’s enough to feel useful, but not daunting; it’s shockingly helpful to have to articulate things in one place, and it’s a level of detail I would not have thought about without someone else bringing it up. It’s better that it comes from a book than one of us needing to force the conversation.

The wedding section at Barnes and Noble is the most blatant signal I’ve come across that this process is not really intended for dudes. There’s some chicken and some egg at play — If men were more involved, there’d probably be more books for them. But nothing about wedding planning is inherently, “for women.” I suspect you could take most of the pink and green wedding books, change the typefaces and color schemes, and with one day of editing have a book that presents as more gender neutral. Which sounds silly, I know. But unfortunately, this is what I think a lot of planning a wedding comes down to: our very human instinct to worry about presentation.

My gut reaction to a “how to” book is to find it corny or unnecessary. “The Artist’s Way”, “X Habits to Change Your Life…” The story I tell myself is that I am mostly a self-sufficient person. If I want something enough, I can figure out how to do it on my own, and not pay someone to do it for me. For years that’s how I treated my finances, my health, my work, my bike (which currently sits in our spare room for a second straight month because I refuse to take it to the shop). You could reasonably label this a result of toxic masculinity, but I’d bet there’s a little more to it than that, and it’s probably not just limited to guys. What’s more, it’s mostly worked out alright. I muddled through 30+ years on this dumb planet without going to the doctor much, filing my own taxes. I was pretty lucky. That changed in 2021.

That spring, I went through a very bad bout of depression. The pandemic, professional woes, my dog died… I’m not sure if you remember what it was like back then, but it was not a good time. I was spending hours on the floor, not moving at all, or walking through Brooklyn in a stupor, almost into traffic. Yes, there was suicidal ideation and also one action that I would describe as “short of an attempt, but suicidal in nature.” I told my therapist before anyone else. She (a saint) said I should inform a few people and give them keys to my house. If I ever felt that way again, she said, I should call a hospital, or at least call one of them to come sit with me until the feeling passed.

This was very difficult for me. My friends knew I was a sad dude, but rarely, if ever, had I asked them to go out of their way to help. I did not like the idea that my own thoughts were not something I could YouTube into submission. But by that point, I’m not even sure I was asking for help, so much as asking for saving. And so I read a few folks in, and on more than one occasion they did just come sit with me.

I’m doing better now (thanks for asking!) and while I have had bad stretches since, they’ve been different. When I first moved to California, Lina was one of the first people to whom I said, “Hey, I have depression. Sometimes it gets kind of bad, and so I try to let a few people know in case of an emergency.” I felt like I could trust her to not judge, which proved true, even when she caught me reading a book called, “Fear of Intimacy.”

Last Sunday we sat down with our shared wedding planning book and started crossing out items in Section One we decidedly won’t be having at our wedding (porta potties, a reception musician), and circling things we need to figure out (hotel rooms, decorations, tipping vendors). Whether it’s wedding planning or brain stuff or something else, the book is usually at least a little helpful. I suggest getting the book. Despite what you may think, you are probably not cooler than the book.

As Kafka said, “You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.” *

Eric

*Kafka’s aphorisms, #103, currently, predictably, on my nightstand. I’m sorry.